Website CMS

[zebulunn]

Hi ladies and gents,

 

I am looking for a (ideally free) CMS to start designing a new external website for the school.

 

The media resources team are currently updating a 2003 Sharepoint site.

We in the IT office want to do away with this back-end quite soon and move to something more modern and simple to modify, without looking simple!

 

After setting the new website up we will then hand it over to MR to maintain, so it needs to be fairly easy to update images and perhaps move a couple of 'modules' around.

 

Wordpress seems to be the most obvious one, but I would like to know what you suggest/using for your schools.

 

Many thanks

[win]

I would suggest going with the crowd and using WP. Plenty of plugins and lots of support on the net.

[bobt]

I would suggest going with the crowd and using WP. Plenty of plugins and lots of support on the net.

 

+1 for Wordpress

[rich_tech]

+1 for Wordpress, easily customisable and plenty of plugins/features of high standards, themes and plugins can be bought easily enough too

[webman]

Automatically saying "use this one", without knowing all the details, is not the best way to choose a CMS There are a number of variables that go into deciding on the best one for to use in a given situation. Such as...

 

Where is the design coming from?

I.e. is there someone with the technical skills to create and implement it within a CMS, or is the expectation that you will just choose a theme and install it?

 

What are your content requirements?

Is it just a blog and pages, or are there different types of content that need to be managed more easier than you can with a WYSIWYG editor?

 

Who needs to support it?

When things go wrong - where do you go? If it's the CMS' community - how active, friendly and responsive are they? How active is the CMS project as a whole? When was it last updated and what does the future look like?

 

Where is it going to be hosted?

Do you have all of the requirements and know-how to do this yourself if self-hosting?

 

Security

How secure is the CMS, in general? How many known vulnerabilities are there, and how quickly are they addressed? Who will be responsible for finding out about updates and applying them?

 

Extendability

If you want to add custom functionality or integrate with other systems - how easy is it do this?

[rush_tech]

We use Joomla here.

[unixman_again]

+1 for Joomla

[RichCowell]

We used Concrete5 before we moved the site to Schudio... I'd fiddled with WP a few times but it just didn't seem very logical in the back end to me... could just be me though! lol

[synaesthesia]

+1 for Wordpress. Really really easy with lots of support. Moved away from Joomla (mostly because of huge security bug at the time, then second mostly because it really was rubbish and unintuitive to use) a while ago.

[visioN]

+1 Joomla

[Trapper]

Joomla good, as is Sharepoint 2013 on Office365

[zebulunn]

Thanks for the suggestions, kind of expected Wordpress to be the most popular.

I will also have a look at Concrete5, never heard of it before!

[JackCPickup]

concrete5 - Free CMS | Open Source Content Management System use it on all our school's sites.

[novastorm]

wordpress