Choosing an Open Source CMS

[edusites]

I run a series of educational websites and am looking for an alternative to static html - so... an open source content management system seems sensible. I like the idea of a database driven modular structure with dynamic pages.

However, what to choose is always the question on people's minds - pros and cons, etc.

My initial research leads me towards to more in-depth scrutiny of Joomla, Drupal and Moodle.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated. Kind regards, Richard Gent

[e] richardgent@mac.com
[w] www.edusites.co.uk

[webman]

I use Website Baker for several sites I manage.

[Geoff]

Also consider Plone.

http://plone.org/

[Jona]

moodle is good at what it does... but might be overkill for CMS, it's more designed as a VLE / to provide online courses. I'm sure someone will be along momentarily to plug the edugeek Joomla package ;-)

Cheers
Jona

[alan-d]

Joomla or e107

Both are easy to setup and use.

[edusites]

Thanks for your initial comments. I may be looking to provide VLE style online courses in the future so that feature might be attractive.

How do I narrow my choice?

I need a PHP programmer I use to be able to work with the platform.

I need it to be flexible and robust.

I need it to support subscription / access systems.

It needs to be capable of reducing cross browser compatibility issues.

It needs to have flexible style sheets / templates.

It needs to sync well with forums and other social networking options.

It needs to cope with podcasting.

It needs to be able to communicate with LMS / SIMS.

It needs to cope with huge user rates and very large content management.

It needs to offer tried and tested WYSIWYG interfaces.

It should be able to cope with multiple authors / content managers.

And...

* Dynamic form builders
* Business or organizational directories
* Document management
* image and multimedia galleries
* E-commerce and shopping cart engines
* Forums and chat software
* Calendars
* Blogging software
* Directory services
* Email newsletters
* Data collection and reporting tools
* Banner advertising systems

I need to be able to access expert support relatively swiftly and easily.

I'm sure there are loads of things I'm over looking...

Further advice would be FAB! Many thanks.