Best CMS for College/University Website

[karan_jhr]

I am planning to switch my current University static website to a CMS based website

Basically i use menu and sub menus
Announcements
News
Events
Galleries
Contacts
Custom Forms

etc..

I am not fussy about the platform but want a good CMS which can handle all this?
What would you recommend?
Thanks

[p858snake]

Drupal and Joomla seem popular on these forums.

[GREED]

Jooma is very popular at the moment and apparently (not played with it myself) very easy to use.

[penfold_99]

I would go with wordpress, its update and plugin system is the best and easiest to use.

[webman]

Open Source Content Management System - Open Source CMS - CMS PHP - CMS Made Simple

I recently finished this website using it, has just about all the features you've asked for.

[karan_jhr]

as i mentioned i am looking for these features

Announcements
News
Events
Galleries
Contacts
Custom Forms for admissions and results etc
Degree Plan... Academic Calender etc

Which one shall i pick

Wordpress
Joomla
Drupal

[dhicks]

Custom Forms for admissions and results etc
Degree Plan... Academic Calender etc

Is this for an actual university, or is this a homework assignment? If it's for an actual university then you'll need to consider how you'll integrate the CMS with your current systems - if your academic calendar is currently contained in a MIS of some kind, for instance, you might want to check what import / export plugins are available for each CMS. Do you use a virtual learning environment (VLE) - Moodle, maybe? I understand Drupal integrates well with Moodle. If your VLE, Moodle or otherwise, supports some kind of repository API then, again, you might want to check which CMS also has support.

[somabc]

We use this Oracle Portal Home

[karan_jhr]

Dear dhicks
Its not a student project..... i am just looking for solutions
There is no current MIS implemented. We manage it manually via a simple asp form and its really cumbersome
We do use Moodle but its not integrated with our website since currently its a static website

[Erigas]

It really depends on what you plan to do. In general Wordpress is the most full blog engine, it might be efforts-consuming to build good looking galleries and degree plan. Drupal is fully-functional CMS, otherwise make a note that it is more community focused. Anyway you never mentioned that you expect your site to have community from the very first day. Joomla! basic installation package have no default community packages as it is in Drupal. So, Joomla! basic package is much lighter otherwise its inturnal strucrure is much more flexible. Besides more extensions are available for Joomla! than for Drupal. I recommend Joomla.

[dhicks]

There is no current MIS implemented. We manage it manually via a simple asp form and its really cumbersome

You mean your whole university's student enrollement database is accessed through a single-page ASP form? I'd assumed that most universities these days would have some kind of enrollement database in place that would take in data in some kind of standardised format from various sources (I'm thinking A-level results via UCAS in the UK, but you'll have a different system in Australia) and keep track of a student's progress and grades. You could probably use Moodle for that purpose, of course.

Is this CMS-based website intended to be the university's man home page, the page people land on when they search for your university on Google or similar? If so, that kind of thing is generally created with the help of a graphical designer these days, and you might want to discuss with them which CMS they have experience of. To be honest, most university websites look pretty much the same, so there's probably a drop-in template available for most CMS packages.

My own choice of CMS would probably be Drupal, but really you'll need to expand on your situation and what you're trying to achive before anyone can recommend anything specific for you.