[SWLUG] Choosing a CMS

[Steve Smith]

Here's a summary of a thread from Ubuntu-UK.  Can anyone here give me
any extra info, particularly in answer to the questions I've
interspersed below?

---

On 05/07/06, Grant <grant at cherrysupport.com> wrote:
> Joomla is a fork of Mambo.  The original developer team got fed up with
> Mambo trying to scam money out of users and developers that they all jumped
> ship together and have been working on Joomla for ages.

Ah, I knew there was a fork, but didn't know which way around and why
- one down, thanks!

On 05/07/06, Joseph Price <pricechild at gmail.com> wrote:
> I LOVE drupal. [...]
> I'm perfectly happy helping with this if it gets used.

Thanks!  Sorry if it was ambiguous, it's not for UKTeam, it's for my
Photographic Society website.  But I might well be coming to you if I
run into trouble :)

On 05/07/06, Lee Tambiah <l_tambiah at linuxmail.org> wrote:
> Joomla can be hard to change and customise in comparison with Drupal. It is true that
> Joomla has flashy looks out of the box, but dont let this influence your final decision.

I'm trying to make something that'll be unrecognisable by the time I
finish with it, so Drupal's looking good.

On 05/07/06, Robert Schumann <robert at cantab.net> wrote:
> I found Xoops to be very open source (read: kind of chaotic). In
> particular, the plugins and themes I looked at were often of poor
> quality and I don't think I was very impressed with the markup produced
> by native Xoops - but this is from playing with it more than a year ago.

On 05/07/06, "tedsmith28 at yahoo.co.uk" <tedsmith at f3.org.uk> wrote:
> I use Xoops [...] It was voted 2nd place in the recent
> 'Best Open Source Project' at Sourceforge 2006 [..]
> Xoops is largely considered the most powerful CMS but likewise requires an
> amount of skill to tweak to your liking. It is not as 'pretty' out of the box as
> the likes of Mambo etc but the end result is much more customised with a massive
> variety of modules.

I've not come across Xoops before, does that mean it's less widely
used than Drupal and the others?  Perfect, clean, accessible markup is
a must for me, do you know if it's improved in the last year?

So can anyone put a good case for Joomla?  Otherwise Drupal seems to
be winning hands down!  I'll give them a go on opensourcecms.com too.
Thanks for all the input from everyone, sorry if I haven't quoted you!

Steve :)