Best open-source CMS

From your own experiences, what is the best open-source CMS available today?

wordpress, sure it's a weblog but you can use it for some websites too never used a regular CMS, I know some guy is using Joomla as backend while all the pages are created by himself

Yes Joomla seems to be very popular, people at sitepoint.com make money from using it in there sites,
Its not that hard to make one in dreamweaver

the bad thing with Joomla is that the generated code is very bad (you need to use some seo add-on)

If you are going to use Joomla, I think that Drupal is a better solution. On the other hand if you need something easy and quick, wordpress is always a great choice ;)

Drupal if you really want a CMS its permission and node system makes it flexible and it has a really good API system meaning the number of modules (plugins) make even wordpress plugin db look small.

With a little learning anyone can create half decent and complex sites without any php coding, just through the CCK/Views/Actions modules.

However if you only want to publish a group of articles then Wordpress, if you want to be bogged down in appalling code, bad documentation and a bunch of support forums telling you they don't know either then by all means Joomla but its your own sanity your throwing away.

I would have to agree with Tim and Nikolas
that Drupal is much more powerful and flexible but a bit complex for beginners

wordpress on the other hand for simple sites might be the best solution

thanks everyone. Drupal and Wordpress it is then.

just wondering thou why Joomla won last years award for the best cms?

I think the awards are given by people didn't know about web development :D

Joomla is OK for people didn't know better, I guess the price is always because it's very easy to use.

It it has managed to gather a lot of great designers around it and there are some stunning
(paid) templates for it.  Drupal is just starting to attract web designers lately.

Also I think Joomla was forked 2-3 years ago from Mambo which was an open source CMS that was backed up by full time employees of Miro and started in 2000 and by the time that Drupal came out (open source community backed) Mambo had already a lot of followers.

When joomla came out - from the developers of Mambo that did not like the practices of Miro - lots of the users jump immediately from Mambo to joomla.

without descending the thread into politics just look at the president of US :D

the best don't always win, Drupal has never been a fav with web designers it has a steep learning curve that photoshop fan boys don't like :) though it has been around for many years well before both Joomla and Mambo and has been powering sites like the onion for a fair few years.

drupal 5 and 6 have changed templating to make it more designer friendly and have added some much needed documentation to its templating system.

the reason i asked is i have to make a site for someone who doesnt really like to fuzz around with coding. so i installed wordpress for her and i think its pretty easy to learn to use and get the hang of.

but i think drupal is what i will be using for my next site. thanks again for the info.

Tim I agree with you but just to get the record straight

Mambo was released in 2000 and it had a company behind it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joomla

and drupal released in 2001 with just a few hobbyists behind it
(thus slower development)
http://drupal.org/node/769

Drop drupal first incarnation was 2000 :) though the source code itself wasn't made public Jan 2001, Mambo source code was released in April 2001 prio to that like Drupal it had been floating but its first formal release and that of the source code on sourceforge was 4 months later then Drupal.

So your right years was inappropriate it seemed like it but I was only dimly aware of mambo still Drupal released it source code and was a open source project pre Mambo and out of the two it was Drupal that was leading at least in terms of major sites running it, but web developers failed to take to it.

Joomla has never left the realm of being an amateur web designer toy running sites that had previously used a nuke clone. Drupal on the other hand never really managed to get into that market at all wordpress sits neatly between the two and with blogging rising became quickly the more popular of the three.

I'm using CMS Made Simple on one of my sites. Was fairly easy to set up and there are a nice variety of free templates available. They aren't too bad to get validated. (I don't think I've seen a CMS or directory script that actually has fully validated templates.)

The main drawbacks that I have found is the script creator seems to be relying on the goodwill of others to support his product and that it seems to be a little bandwidth heavy. He does however put out patches and upgrades as needed. Otherwise, I like it and it provides what I need.

So, we are about to design a community, and while I will not be in charge of install, set up, design, or add ons, I will have to maintain pages, communities, commenting....yada yada yada.

I have used Joomla and it is pretty riigid in my opinion. There are tools but they give you little flexibility, especially if you know a bit of code.

Is Drupal easier to administer?

Considering the open-source CMS.I choose wordpress for my own site .

Wordpress for an online community?

sure together with bbpress ;)

Yeah ,That 's right !

Wordpress has got voted to be the Best Open Source Social Networking CMS in 2007! And that was long BEFORE everything has become even more comfortable with the release of WP 2.5. Today i wouldn't really use anything else than Wordpress anymore and i tried them all.
Wordpress ist fast and reliable. Due to thousands of different plugins you can extend wp to whatever you want/need it to be.
To setup Wordpress isn't difficult and when it setup the right way, you can have great success in search engine listings within days or weeks. I've proofed that many times.
You're welcome to use my free Wordpress installation guide, so you won't forget or skip a step on your road to success!
50 steps to install Wordpress the right way.

We have sites that run on Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla but I like most our Drupal site. There so many bugs in wordpress and their security is not stable.

i like wordpress,it's plug-ins very powerful

I use Wordpress and it does all the things I need to and the code is easy to edit
So is a good CMS for me.

I would have to go with Joomla

To my mind, wordpress is the best open-source CMS software.

All the 3 CMS's mentioned here are best in their own terms.. but the best for an individual is the one that it performs better for him and which can be customized according to him...

We have been doing a lot of customized wordpress themes for our clients and Wordpress is the current market right now since lot of plugins are available free in the market and the coding structure is quite easy to understand.!

I use Joomla

i like Joomla, i use it my self Joomla has a lot of support and addon they have a forum where you can get help if you run in to any.

If it is simple cms then wordpress is the best

Great post! Thank you

Wordpress and Joomla are the best CMS in my point of view.

joomla is better , i never face any problem

Well... this is a really interesting thread, except that I am coming away no wiser than I was before.

What my problem is about, is to set up a small website with a community forum for local garden enthusiasts.

Lots of people are saying that WordPress will do almost anything. I had thought that WordPress was for blogging, but it has such a huge following and brilliant reputation that I'd go with it... if it really can do everything. Can anyone point to a professional website with forum powered by WordPress? I would actually like to see the pudding, as it were, and not just hear how nice it tastes!

Then there's the Joomla -v- Drupal strife. Both apparently have forum, blog etc add-ons available.

Joomla has more users. The Drupal people sneer that this is because Joomla is easy to learn, but it is not so reliable or extendable as Drupal, and not so suitable for big sites. Can anyone point to a Drupal-powered site and say, "This is brilliant, but couldn't be done in Joomla!" (Or vice versa.)

Nobody says that Drupal is unreliable or underpowered, but they do say it is very hard to learn. That is my first impression too. Does anyone know of a gentle introduction to Drupal?

Coldfire,

I consider myself pretty novice when it comes to web devlopment, I know very little and was able to pick up Drupal rather quickly. Because it's open source they have a forum community and you can usually go to google and type "drupal.org your question" and find an answer to any problem you encounter.

The other thing I think is great about Drupal is that they continually update the source code for it as the web evolves and there are always new plug ins and templates being developed by users...  

I personally love Drupal and wouldn't use anything else but the only other CMS' I have experience with are Nucleus, B2 Evolution, and Joomla. I actually thought Joomla was more clunky and difficult to use than Drupal was but that's just my personal opinion.

To add to the discussion...  I've also heard good things about "Cushy CMS" from people who I respect.

Many thanks, AMD (I bet your friends call you AMD for short)! You have encouraged me to persevere in learning Drupal.

Apparently this is hot-hot-hot!

A new project JOOPAL combines the best of Joomla and Drupal.

See it at: http://community.joomla.org/blogs/leadership/780-introducing-joopal.html

Joopal details

wordpress is the best open blog cms,zencart is a good shopping cart cms.

Wordpress I take a very long time. Experience only positive, no matter what would not trade

Has anyone know any of good Java CMS? I do not know PHP too much - but I know Java pretty good... It is not worth for me to learn PHP just only to develop my PHP CMS.

Wordpress is one the best CMS now a days.

(Sob...) I'm not sure if there is anything worse than an April Fool joke that is just ignored!

LOL, I didn't see that coming :)

Joomla is not bad! wordpress too.

To speak from my point of view: Every cms got its own advantage and disadvantage. But what I found out is that Joomla got the most addons and components available out there. Ok, some of them are not free, but even then they hardly cost more than $20...

It depends on your needs. However, Drupal does seem to offer the most scalable and flexible framework. Sure, it takes a little more work up front to get it going, but that investment is worth it in the end.

Wordpress for me!

Word Press is the best and Open Source CMS.I use its daily.

Wordpress , Joomla ..
Both are great .