[Beds] Website

[Stephen Newey]

Hi Mike

I'm afraid I don't really have any specific experience of Joomla to  
be able to offer you solid advice or a comparison to Plone. Maybe  
someone else here does? Alternatively, you can have a look at  
www.cmsmatrix.org to get a feature-by-feature comparison.

I've spent a good few years of my career up until recently as a web  
developer, mostly utilising PHP.  More recently I discovered Python  
and was blown away by how much better (in this man's opinion) it is  
than PHP. Since then I do nearly everything with Python, which  
somewhat rules out PHP-based CMSes for my use!

I think it comes down to your circumstances and what you're trying to  
build. Plone is a fantastic product out the box if you primarily want  
to "just use" the system and are happy with the available third party  
add ons (which covers my needs for my personal website and I think  
should cover the LUG site's needs too). It is also incredibly  
extensible, but to do so you're looking at a large learning curve  
(especially if you're not familiar with Python), mostly getting to  
grips with the complexities of the Zope application server that forms  
the basis of it.

If the site you're talking about will require lots of extra bespoke  
functionality it perhaps isn't the ideal choice for you. If you're  
comfortable and well versed in PHP it's probably a good idea to stick  
with what you know.

If you're interested in an alternative to PHP (a million arbitrarily  
and inconsistently named functions in the global namespace isn't my  
idea of fun anymore) that will allow for pretty rapid development and  
comes with lots of tools in the box to save you doing the boring  
stuff like templating, authentication, etc over and over again, I'd  
thoroughly recommend getting to know Django (http:// 
www.djangoproject.com/). It's a Python web app framework that is  
often compared to Ruby on Rails. It's built to support journalistic  
deadline. The developers mention having often produced new  
functionality that's live on their large content-driven newspaper  
site within hours of conceiving of the idea.

I hope that's of some use, let me know if you've got any more questions.

Cheers
Steve


On 31 Aug 2006, at 15:17, <0MMyrtek at oag.com> wrote:

> Hi Stephen,
>
>
> I am looking after a website for an Australian organisation. The first
> Website was a bespoke php application that I designed myself.  
> However I
> have been searching for a good CMS for a long time; I was about to
> implement Joomla but since you mentioned Plone I wonder how this
> compares to Joomla?
>
> If you have time maybe you could give me some tips?
>
> Regards
>
> Mike
>