To all of you webdesigners:

I am tempted to go with the flow and remake my website using one of the open source Content Management Systems - but I am overwhelmed trying to decide which one... Drupal, Jumla, Wordpress... something else?

My present site is this one (http://www.efarkas.com) and I altered an open source css-based template to make it look like it is - I have some basic html/css knowledge, I use Dreamweaver.

Basically I don't want that much blogging, just a nice clean family site to post pictures, and most of all, videos; it is so cumbersome via Dreamweaver/FTP, I gave up after a while, as my site shows. I'm on PC.

Thanks,

I'm not much up to date on the open source CMS offerings.

I was thinking about doing something similar, but instead of hosting the videos on my site, I'd post them to vimeo.com and then just embed them on my site's pages. This way the videos are downloaded from vimeo instead of from my connection. I believe this would require you to purchase a membership at vimeo.

Your mileage may very, void where prohibited, yada yada yada ;-)

I have 3 sites using 3 different CMS platforms: Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal. From hardest to easiest to use I would say it goes Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, but that is also the ranking, in my opinion, from most powerful/customizable to least. That said, looking at your current site, I would go with Wordpress, but that's just my opinion. The others would be overkill I think, unless there is more you want to do. I use Wordpress for my family site, along with zenphoto for the photo portion, and I embed Vimeo videos on it (there's a Vimeo gadget that lets me do that). An alternative to zenphoto is using wpg2 to connect wordpress and gallery2 (photo gallery), but gallery2 doesn't play nice with some web hosts (it has lots of "innodes"- individual files and directories, which can put you near some web host innode limits). There are some photoblog themes out there for Wordpress, too, which might be the way to go.

Thanks Evan,

I am administering one part of a larger website, the video part, built with Wordpress, but I have not installed the application. And I understand when you say WP is the least feature-rich. So I guess it's time for me to learn something new, and since I like to keep my brain fresh, I'll go for the hardest one.

Does Drupal have built-in photo and video handling? I will be hosting the video on the same server, I like to have full control and not be affected by some external host deciding to pull the plug on a service - my host is GoDaddy.

I'm not using Drupal for photos or videos, so I'm not sure, but I'm fairly certain it is not built in. But Drupal has tons of modules, and it works a bit differently than, say, Joomla. Joomla's modules are very "monolithic" in the sense that they are pretty all-encompassing (for example, an entire community building component, and you pretty much are stuck with however it works) whereas Drupal's are very Lego-like. You put together small pieces to get what you need. If you check out the modules section of drupal.org, I'm sure you'll find some good stuff.

Yes, thanks.

I already put my eyes on Kaltura for video and stills.

Late to the party as usual but how are you finding kaltura Ervin? Which CMS are you using it with? I tried both Drupal and Wordpress but ended with wordpress for various reasons and ended up writing a plugin to host my flash and mp4 vidoes in.

Well, I am moving at snail pace... have not started anything yet on my site, but it so happened that I have to manage another site, made with WP, so I thougth to myself, this is a good opportunity for me to play around and make a more informed decision.

Godaddy, my host, has all of the major CMSs 'in stock', it's just a matter of a few clicks to install either one of them automatically, not even having to worry about manual install. Plus I will have free tech support, which is sweet.

Will report back later.

Does Drupal have built-in photo and video handling?.

Yes, Drupal has some excellent modules that integrate video and photos into your site. But there will be a large learning curve when jumping to Drupal (not to discourage you, but just letting you know that you will be putting some time in because Drupal is awesome).

A great module for video is FlashVideo | drupal.org (http://drupal.org/project/flashvideo) (note: most video applications may not work with godaddy, unless godaddy has ffmpeg installed on their servers, I'm not sure if they do, but ffmpeg is what almost every online video application uses to encode videos the flv or other formats)

There are tons of other video and photo options available for Drupal, check out Drupal Modules - Search, Rate, and Review Drupal Modules (http://drupalmodules.com) to search and learn about all the modules available for Drupal.

Godaddy, my host, has all of the major CMSs 'in stock', it's just a matter of a few clicks to install either one of them automatically, not even having to worry about manual install. Plus I will have free tech support, which is sweet.

Be careful with the stock approaches. I know there are some CMS platforms that discourage going that route, but I can't remember why (security issues? nonstandard install?).

usually it is just the amount of time it can take for updates to be put onto the system. This could mean that you potentially have your site open to known exploits while waiting for Godaddy to update.

Wordress is simple to install.

It boils down to (parts of guide taken from wordpress.org):

Setup a DB via your go daddy account. I used to have 1and1 but Im sure they are similar and have a DB control panel in the main control panel of your account. Create a mySQL DB and it will give you a user name and password with a URL. Write or copy that information.

Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php that is in your wordpress folder.

Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor and fill in your database details as explained in Editing wp-config.php to generate and use your secret key password.

Place the WordPress files in the desired location on your web server:
If you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g. Example Web Page (http://example.com/)), move or upload all contents of the unzipped WordPress directory (but excluding the directory itself) into the root directory of your web server.

If you want to have your WordPress installation in its own subdirectory on your web site (e.g. http://example.com/blog/), rename the directory wordpress to the name you'd like the subdirectory to have and move or upload it to your web server. For example if you want the WordPress installation in a subdirectory called "blog", you should rename the directory called "wordpress" to "blog" and upload it to the root directory of your web server.

Finally Run the WordPress installation script by accessing wp-admin/install.php in your favorite web browser.
If you installed WordPress in the root directory, you should visit: http://example.com/wp-admin/install.php
If you installed WordPress in its own subdirectory called blog, for example, you should visit: http://example.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php

First time will probably take 20 minutes but after that you will only take about 5 mins for an upgrade.

OK people, I took the jump and clicked 'install Drupal' in the Godaddy hosting panel. They do have the latest version, 6.9 (v7 is still Beta as I understand). The application has a version check and it reports 'up to date'. I am sure Godaddy will upgrade as soon as the new version comes out.

A few minutes later (was monitoring via FTP) a host of files popped up in the folder I specified. So far so good, but as warned by you here and others whom already have gone through this - it is not easy. I will have to learn the new jargon that comes with PHP, MySQL, etc. But having some experience with HTML coding helps.

Re-encoding video is not a concern for me, as this is not going to be another Youtube, it's my personal site; I will encode myself all the video I upload. After all I think I'm an editor in the first place, web developer only comes second on the hobby list. [But wait, there's also radio amateurism, classical music, and I still have to find the time to play with my kids... aaah, too many toys, to little time to play]...

I will show you my progress as soon as I figure out the basics.

Be aware that with Drupal, going from a major # release (like from 6 to 7), is not necessarily a simple thing. Modules from Drupal 5, for example, are not compatible with Drupal 6 unless/until the maintainer (or you) update the module. That makes it harder to upgrade for major releases, but keeps Drupal from being help back by efforts to maintain backwards compatibility. Drupal is my favorite CMS, though, and major releases aren't too common. I think that the Drupal developers support the current release, plus one prior release, so if you start with Drupal 6 now, it should be supported for a couple of years (I have heard that although there is no official release date or code freeze date for Drupal 7, it might not even be until the end of 2009).

I noticed that you guys have mentioned video, audio, and photo modules for drupal, but does anyone have any good recommendations for similar modules/components on joomla?

I would love to learn drupal, but I've already started development (and already purchased a template) on joomla, so I'm afraid it's going to have to suffice for awhile. So for joomla, how would you guys recommend hosting video, audio, and photos?

Thanks,
Glenn Fisher

I'm not sure about video, but there is a gallery2 plugin that integrates joomla with gallery2. It has been a while since I used it, though, and that was with Joomla 1, not 1.5.

I can't advise, I don't like the websites created by most of those CMS packages. I think they look like cookie cutter sites. Of course, I started web development when the blink tag was new and exciting. I still use a text editor and do all of my development by hand. For content management, I wrote my own parser with my own database format. I don't trust other people to write my code for me, I developed during the browser wars and the habits stuck for making sites cross platform well. Stubborn Paranoia on my part.

I'll give you my parser if you'd like as a starting point, it is short and simple to read (cause I have to support it myself) and only supports the specific things I'm using it for, but it can be abstracted easily.

I can't advise, I don't like the websites created by most of those CMS packages. I think they look like cookie cutter sites. Of course, I started web development when the blink tag was new and exciting. I still use a text editor and do all of my development by hand. For content management, I wrote my own parser with my own database format. I don't trust other people to write my code for me, I developed during the browser wars and the habits stuck for making sites cross platform well. Stubborn Paranoia on my part.

I'll give you my parser if you'd like as a starting point, it is short and simple to read (cause I have to support it myself) and only supports the specific things I'm using it for, but it can be abstracted easily.


I think it is awesome that you can design your own database and content management system that suites your needs. However I highly disagree that all CMS look like cookie cutter websites. There are plenty of open source CMS that provide a "framework" plateform for building your website. Using a CMS that is supported by a large community is like having 1000 web developers working for you, creating more features, fixing bugs, and better security.

If you still think a CMS like Drupal offer only cookie cutter style websites, then check out Drupal sites | Dries Buytaert (http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites)

There is no definitive answer to this question, as there are advantages and disadvantages on both sides. Writing your own code is nice and you can make your site look and work exactly the way you want it. Downside: as technology and public taste evolves, you have to be on your tiptoes all the time or your site will look outdated.

I started with FrontPage and graduated to Dreamweaver; got to the point where I can write simple code in a text editor. But I got tired of keeping my site on my computer and uploading/synchronizing all the time. So now I want to do it all on a web interface, and be able to change the look of the whole site with a click. Sure I can re-write the css/stylesheet code behind my site but why bother when, as mentioned just above, thousands of others can do that for me, way better than me.

Also, a CMS-based site is pretty much the only alternative for small organizations, businesses, or churches where the designer is not always available to make updates, so a few others can chip in and keep the site up to date.

[Just as a side note, Cole, your site is not very PC/Windows friendly. I am trying to watch your 2007 demo reel, and it would not load. Please don't take this as a personal attack; it is my general experience that QT on some sites works fine on my PC, while QT from other sites does not work at all. FWIW mpeg4 in a flash player brings the best of both worlds together: the high quality of qt/mp4 video - looks like you're a Mac person - and the universal Flash player].

I think it is awesome that you can design your own database and content management system that suites your needs. However I highly disagree that all CMS look like cookie cutter websites. There are plenty of open source CMS that provide a "framework" plateform for building your website. Using a CMS that is supported by a large community is like having 1000 web developers working for you, creating more features, fixing bugs, and better security.

If you still think a CMS like Drupal offer only cookie cutter style websites, then check out Drupal sites | Dries Buytaert (http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites)

I'll assume that I'm just viewing sites as examples that are made by non-designers or folks who don't know how to customize their layouts then. This held true even back in the early 90's when SO MANY people were simply putting up pages that were text with lists of links and not much else... Search engines were small and new at the time (Yahoo was still a personal student page at Stanford and Google and Alta Vista were far off on the horizon). No one new what was possible yet, or how to go about achieving it. In the late 90's, flash sites were doing the same thing... too much bling bling on sites distracting from the content specifically.

I think that's alot of what is still happening, a handful of really talented and "What Box" thinking people are creating great and original sites with content that is easily access by the audience, and a million others that look like one another because it's the easiest route to get the info online.

I just wanted to quickly say that Wordpress is actually an incredibly great tool to use as a CMS. I've built many sites using all variety of open source, proprietory and custom CMS' over the years - but for now, unless I need to make a site that's incredibly complex, I've found that Wordpress has been more than able to handle things. It's easy to install and get up and running, plus you have complete control over everything. It's got a great community base, and there are ample free plug-ins so that you can quickly and easily expand upon your site.

Cole, I have to disagree... You would be surprised how many high profile, well designed, and great looking sites are out there that are powered by tools such as Wordpress. As long as you design your templates right, and customise any plugins to suit your own needs (most produce good valid code, but some need a bit of tweaking), you can easily create a site that has beautiful clean, compliant and valid XHTML code with stunning style sheets.

I must confess, I'm not a programmer or web designer by any stretch of the imagination - but over the years I've had to throw together all manner of sites. As someone who's had to code complex online ticketing systems using ASP, hand written CMS' using PHP, etc. I must say - Wordpress just makes everything so much similer. But the main reason I love it is that once the site is up-and-running, ANYONE can update it without ANY prior knowledge of Wordpress. The backend interface is just so simple and easy to navigate.

That said, there are plenty of other great options out there - but don't overlook the simple blogging platform. It's much more powerful than you'd think!

Over and out!

Chris!