I'm searching for a CMS solution for a community-based website consisting of the following features:

* Blog/News & Reviews section
* Forum
* Shopping cart/product catalogue - probably the single most important aspect
* Easy customisation using templates
* RSS Feeds
* A centralised membership database so that once you are logged in on the home page, you can post in the forum, comment on the blog, submit reviews etc without having seperate logins for each section.
* Scalability - I'm not expecting a huge amount of traffic, but I would like a system that could hold up under the occasional large spike in traffic
* Easy to upgrade
* Easy to use and setup - I know some basic HTML and a bit of scripting in asp (but not php or CSS) and have set up a WordPress blog previously. I'm not exactly an expert, but I can do the basic and intermediate stuff. Although ideally speaking, I would prefer something that just works well out of the box. The trickiest aspects I would imagine would be the shopping cart/product catalogue part. I would need a system that could provide that functionality without me having to tear my hair out.


From doing some research here and elsewhere, I have come across the following solutions. These appear to be the most popular ones:

* joomla - seems to be really good and has decent functionality
* drupal - ditto for drupal
* Typo3 - complex, but extensive functionality
* cmsmadesimple - really simple to use, but I wonder how well it compares with joomla, drupal and Typo3
* DotNetNuke - appears to have great functionality, but I would prefer to use a non-Microsoft solution to reduce licensing costs
* cmsMS
* Expression Engine
* Movable Type - looks really good. Doesn't appear to have much support for the eCommerce side of things


What would you guys recommend? Which of them works best with shopping carts?

You'll probably get votes for all of the above. From your list I would go with either Joomla or Drupal, less from personal experience and more from what people have told me.

I use WordPress for most of my CMS needs. If you add a few plugins you can get all the functionality you're looking for and it's probably the easiest to work with. bbpress is the forum plugin. I can't remember the name of the shopping cart plugin, but it shouldn't be hard to find with a search for 'WordPress shopping cart'

They should all be able to use the same login and all the other requirements you have are built into WordPress by default.

Sorry for adding another option to your list, but I like WordPress.

Thanks for the response. I'm veering towards Joomla or Drupal for the reason you mentioned as well. I'm not sure if WordPress would be a comprehensive enough solution. It probably would be in the initial phase. But I might want to expand the website in the future.

bump.

More and more I've been thinking WordPress can do well as a full CMS. I'm probably biased since I work with it so much and find it easy to customize, but with just a few plugins you can really most of the things you want.

The other night I was looking into it and did a search for 'WordPress full CMS' or something similar and found some good information. From what I understand both Joomla and Drupal have a higher learning curve, but if you're up for the learning they're good solutions. At some point I'll learn both of them more myself.

Problem is I'm not sure if WordPress would have all the functionality I would need.

We use WP a lot because it's so versatile. So far outside of that we've had good luck with Expression Engine and Drupal. Although I would stay away from EE because they don't have a shopping cart yet and I can see that's an important part of your project.

First off, you are looking for much more than CMS.
CMS = Content Management System

Templates and RSS are a matter of publishing, not CMS. A membership database is not content management, neither is a shopping cart.

The thing is, when you are looking for something, you need to express what it is.

So, what you are really looking for are several things that integrate well with each other.

• CMS
• Publishing system that supports rss, blog, and news
• a forum
• a shopping cart
• a single sign-on solution

One way to handle the single sign-on bit might be to integrate your accounts (on each system) with OpenId. This could simplify things for users that already have openid accounts. It could also make your integration tasks easier.

good luck

That's a good point. A CMS really is about managing content and some of the other things you may want will be best served by integrating several apps.

One of the reasons I do like WordPress is because many of those other things can easily be integrated via plugins.

For example looking at Paul's list above, WP is a CMS. You can publish what will appear as static pages and with a plugin you can have it look just like the typical folder structure you would set up on a static site.

I hope it's obvious that WP can handle rss, blogging, and news since that's what it was orginally designed to do.

The developers of WordPress are developing bbPress, which is forum software built on the basic ideas of WP. It's not quite mature yet, but it's still pretty good as is with a couple of plugins. It's not going to compete with vBulletin right now, but given a developer community is likely to grow around it I expect in a year or two it will be competing well.

There are a variety of shopping cart plugins available for WordPress

If you're using WP and associated plugins all should be using the same user database and so one login should take care of everyone.

The above isn't to say WordPress should be your only option. There are clearly other solutions out there. Do keep in mind your ultimate solution may be a combination of several apps instead of just one.

I'd argue that WordPress is a tightly integrated CMS and publishing system (it's actually kind of hard to just get content from WordPress).

To the main topic, take to heart what Steven's comment. You may be able to build a system around wordpress by using plugins for some functionality and even writing plugins to integrate it with other systems.

Good point and I agree. Hopefully more people will see it that way instead of just as a blogging platform, because it has become more.

I suggest to build your own CMS, this way ur CMS will be light and include just all your requests.
we already have our own CMS 2.0 and we are now building the 3.0 version, but its a windows application, and u host ur website with us and then u will not need to pay any license fees just hosting account.

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You didn't add wordpress in your list, I think this is the best CMS around

You didn't add wordpress in your list

No, but the majority of discussion in the post has been around WordPress so I think it's safe to say it's been covered.

I use Joomla for everything I do-
You could add in VirtueMart and Fireboard for your shopping and forum'ing needs, although I've never personally used VirtueMart before...

I just find Joomla has the most versatility and extendability once you truly learn it's quirks and learn how to manipulate it's features to do what you want them to!

DRUPAL DRUPAL DRUPAL!!! When you get into the code you will love Drupal so much better than the other CMS's. You can use Ubercart as the integrated Shopping Cart. And just use different node types for your different types of content. News, Blog, Static pages etc. Drupal is extend able enough to give you everything you need.