I’m looking for suggestions for CMS/Blog software for my site. It’ll have a few static pages and a blog with public and private posts, registered users can comment. The public posts are visible to everyone, the private ones I want to be visible only to members registered on the site, whose registration I have to manually approve. Some of the private posts will be polls, I want each registered member to have only 1 vote (so probably server tracked, not client).
Security/unhackability is important, but not in the sense that there’s any really sensitive information, I just don’t want to get hacked/start spamming, so it probably shouldn’t depend too much on additional plugins/modules that I have to keep track of updating, compatibility etc. right? At least a few pre-made themes would be nice.
Considering these requirements, what do you think is best for the job?
Really, especially with (plugins/modules/what have you) most modern CMS systems would do this admirably. Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, and any number of smaller, lighter weight markdown blog systems, site generators, flat file CMSes.
What technologies are you familiar with, if any? Do you, or anyone working with you, have the time and ability to customize code, or are you looking to deploy something without having to tinker with coding much or any?
It’s not worth investing much time into code customization at this point, it’s better if I can get something running pretty quickly, that’s why I mentioned pre-made themes would be a plus. I’m not really familiar with any CMS (Wordpress a bit). I’ve indeed read a few articles comparing the three big ones albeit not in much detail, Drupal might be overkill so I’m personally looking between Joomla and Wordpress.
The main point I’m looking at is the user registration management and a category of blog posts and pages visible only to registered users. I know I can get this done with WP and plugins, but was wondering if perhaps Joomla or another CMS had better/native support for this and might be better suited for it.
I know for a fact that WordPress can do this with plugins, as I’ve recently done research on it for a project.
I’m no longer familiar with Joomla, it’s been years, but a quick search for information about Joomla’s ACL suggests ( https://docs.joomla.org/J3.x:Access_Control_List_Tutorial ) that it is, in fact, possible. You can create user groups and assign read access to only those groups, if you so desire. If you just want simply registered and not registered, I think that’s even easier.
For content management, with my limited Joomla experience, I hands down preferred WP, but if those are the ones you’re comparing, it’s looking like for user management you might be better off with Joomla or Drupal if you want it to work more completely out of the box, where you just have to fiddle with perms and settings rather than finding third party plugins or writing custom code.
Most of the newer flat file CMS and static site generators will require more customization to get what you want, some of them a lot of customization. End product might be lighter and more easy to manage, but lots more up front work is my guess.