CMS solutions for team website?

[Chris is me]

I've been meaning to make an easy to update and manage 1714 site using Wordpress as a CMS, as for years we've used raw FrontPage html that generally looks pretty bad. Of course, now that I have better things to do with my time I really want to have another go at it. Funny how that works out. WordPress is simple to set up, but as it's designed around blogging, a little bit difficult to work with, and is generally not very conducive to page based formatting.

Anyone know of any good, free content management systems for web sites that allow for server side editing (i.e. you could log in from any computer from the internet and easily modify site content, with some kind of bbcode / wysiwyg editor)? Unless the team gained someone very proficient in web design that I don't know about, this seems like the best way to have an up to date team site.

Thanks in advance!

[Stuart]

1745 uses and loves joomla. its easy to install easy to use, and lots of addons.

[keehun]

Wordpress should work fine as long as you are centering the design/theme around pages instead of posts. (http://theunstandard.5thirtyone.com/ is an epic "CMS-tailored" theme)

Team 2502 has been using Homebrewed Wiki System+punBB. It was very good (we themed our wiki to look exactly like punBB.) We were able to easily make and modify pages. Real easy. So using a wiki system is an option. If you decide to do that, you should really hook up with AdamBots. Like as a designer myself, I puke at a lot of team's websites, but AdamBots is one that I have an orgasm at. (Figuratively). One problem with this is there was not a good communication tool for email blasts/reminders/etc.

Our second year, we had a refresh. We got ExpressionEngine and the forum plugin. It was very powerful, but too powerful and too extensive for our easy-to-maintain needs. Also, the framework in which we built the new site didn't fit the ExpressionEngine's model too well and we had to do quite a bit of hacking around to get things working.

Our third year, this coming season, we have set up a Ruby on Rails server and we're running the RadiantCMS. It's very ubiquitous. It has a large developer base and plugins. For instance, I can hook up all members from Radiant to the Beast forum software on Ruby on Rails. It has page versioning, etc. It's VERY simple. It has Layouts, Snippets, and Pages. Layouts are for the schema of the output document (so here, you can design your page as an RSS page, HTML page layout with 1 column/2column/etc, even a vcard. You get to type in the page structure. Then in snippets you can put stuff like menus/footers where it gets repeated a ton throughout every html page. Then in pages, you worry about nothing but content. This site is being rapidly designed. It took me a while to initially figure out how I was going to put the whole site together, then after that it was real simple. However, this setup is going to require at least 1ROR server and 1nginx/apache server (who says it can't be from the same machine?). Media will have to be loaded off non-ROR server.

So I talked about WP CMS themes, Wikis, ExpressionEngine, Radiant CMS. But there are way more out there, such as Drupal. I personally think it's much more difficult to theme Drupal or Joomla. (It's much like how it's impossible to theme phpBB3 because of its behemoth size). However, there are always usually a theme named Framework or "Reset" that make it easier.

What I'm trying to get at is all the software is basically the same. There is always a learning curve, but in the end, everything gets done the same. I bet AdamsBots could port their site to any CMS you throw at them. If your team has anyone who's been using particular CMS for a while, let that influence your decision because you have someone who already knows how a CMS works.

Thanks,
Keehun

[Greg Needel]

team 2775 uses wordpress, and we love it. There are extensions for almost anything you want to do. Find a theme you like and modify it to fit your team.

www.libertyrobotics.com

[NickE]

254 uses Joomla. We're still working to get a few bugs ironed out, but I would recommend it for its great selection of extensions.

[Andrew Schreiber]

FIRST in Michigan uses glFusion, it works pretty well. 397 used Wordpress but the site is currently down. TBA uses Tumblr for a good portion of their site. Personally I have used Wordpress and Tumblr. I haven't found any problems with any of them. Figure out exactly what you need it to do and make sure it can do it. Either that or find one of the open source ones and tweak it to do what you want.

[sanddrag]

I used e107 for a site a couple years ago and it worked pretty well. You may want to check out www.opensourcecms.com

[lynca]

Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress are the top three CMS clients I suggest.

I've used both wordpress and drupal extensively.
I use Drupal for all my websites now because they have the most flexibility & options. If you are just starting out on website development, I suggest wordpress as a first-time CMS package.

EDIT: Just found this article today - http://drupal.org/best-open-source-PHP-CMS-award-2009

PM me if you have any questions

[dqmot17]

As always, i'm the only one saying DotNetNuke. The only reason for this, is because for people that have no idea what the heck PHP is, VB.net is a lot more readable on this, and it uses more JavaScript for most things than actually generation.
But the other websites are very good. All of the above can be tested locally too (XAMPP) (except DotNetNuke which needs IIS and MSSQL express), so you can download all of them, mess around and decide which you like

[1986titans]

We use Wordpress for our blog here.

The theme (Atahualpa) made it easy enough to customize everything, and I'd recommend it.

[dqmot17]

Originally Posted by 1986titans

We use Wordpress for our blog here.

The theme (Atahualpa) made it easy enough to customize everything, and I'd recommend it.

just a recommendation on your site there, is to fix those icons in the corner.. not looking so hot.

[synth3tk]

I've always been a fan of Joomla and Wordpress. I haven't wrapped my head around Drupal yet, but I hear it's really great, and it seems to be popular, so that's definitely another option.

I second the recommendation of browsing this site: http://www.opensourcecms.com/

It features nearly every CMS/platform worth using, and provides a front-end and back-end demo for every single one of them.

[rdlevy1215]

1676 currently uses WordPress and it does an excellent job: www.team1676.com - but in the past we have used PHP-Fusion (both are free) and work extremely well. We changed over to WordPress because it was a little more customizable to our liking and generally looked a bit "nicer" ... to view our old "PHP-Fusion" site, go to: www.team1676.com/old-news.php

Good Luck!

[hyperdude]

For Team 2503, I code it by hand. I'm starting to think about just wiping it clean and putting in a CMS (save me the trouble of all the PHP work, plus designing it myself).

http://brainerd-robotics.org/

[psrobichaud]

Team 2472 uses the Joomla CMS with several extensions, including a Facebook page stream. For the design, we bought and modified a template made by RocketTheme. It was a little tricky to learn at first, but the result is much better than anything that I could have done (at least, in my skill set) with HTML and CSS. Once you learn its in's and out's, Joomla is easy to work with, and allows team members to post content without needing an html editor, ftp, or coding knowledge. The WSIWYG editor is very nice, and it allows modification of the html, if needed. I would definitely recommend Joomla as a CMS.

Check out our website at http://www.team2472.com