I am looking for a CMS where I can run a site like www.dmv.org.
I really wanted to use wordpress but most of my site will be pages, not posts so I don’t think it would work out well.
Yeah, I was debating including backup_migrate, nodewords, devel, devel_themer and xmlsitemap… They really are essential in the long, especially backup_migrate when moving from development to production.
I haven’t used globalredirect yet, but I just looked at it and that will become one of my essentials as well. Nice suggestion 
Andrew has almost answered the question.
Personally, I think Joomla’s admin panel looks cool and might even be easier for some people to use than Drupal’s (at least the out-of-the box one).
However, in customisability Joomla doesn’t come close to Drupal. The theme engine powering Drupal is far better and Drupal’s API that enables you to code your own modules in case you miss something is head and shoulders above Joomla’s.
At the same time, the learning curve for Drupal is much steeper than for Joomla and it’s not really well suited for smaller sites (I use Wordpress for those, and WP3 seems to have made things much better for even some medium-type projects).
Anyway, here are a couple of other essential Drupal modules:
- backup_migrate
- custom_breadcrumbs: the out-of-the-box breadcrumb navigation is pretty rubbish, either don’t add it in your theme or use this one
- globalredirect: takes care of duplicate content
- nodewords: implements meta tags
- xmlsitemap
- devel and devel_themer: makes theming and module development much easier.
I can’t speak for c2uk but I found the Joomla administration control panel to be frustrating… I haven’t tried it for about two or three years so things hopefully have changed but back then when I wanted to edit a page, it was hunt and peck to find the page from the list and then edit. I like a more intuitive approach where you log-in, click through the site to the page you want to edit and then edit it.
The other thing I’m not crazy about with Joomla is the lack of performance. In head to head competitions, Drupal smokes it.
My preferred platform would be Drupal armed with a set of base modules to get me started:
- Admin_Menu (Horozontal administration menu)
- tinytinyMCE (Rich text)
- IMCE (File Management)
- Views (Custom views, pages, rss feeds, etc…)
- CCK (Custom content types)
- Token (a helper module)
- Pathauto (seo friendly urls)
- Webform (quick form building and data management)
- FAQ (FAQ)
From there you can cherry pick other modules or create your own as you build.
That’s an interesting response. I’ve built a few customer sites with Joomla after a significant learning curve but I’m always open to help and advice from someone who knows better. If I were to make a transition from Joomla to an alternative what would you recommend to a fairly experienced developer as a better alternative? And of course the obvious question - why would your recommendation be better for me? In other words what would be the benefits? Easier? Better Features? Better flexibility?
Many thanks.
Tidalski
don’t follow this advice… at least don’t spend too much looking at Joomla.
Have a look at Joomla!
Yup, it looks custom alright…
I did some looking and it doesn’t appear to have any common CMS signatures. They might be using Smarty templating beneath some sort of custom CMS wrapper. It looks like they’ve borrowed from lots of toolboxes. WebDav, PHP, SWFObject, jQuery and AJAX Libraries API.
It could be achieved with one of the industrial strength CMS platforms as noted by bluedreamer. That would be the direction I would take a project of this size, if only for ease of maintenance and future additions.
It looks like a custom written site. I think you’d struggle to shoehorn all that type of content and structure into Wordpress, more industrial strength CMS’s like Drupal or Expressioneengine would be more suitable.
well, this site has a couple of applications like comparison of insurance rates, find your local office, practice tests - getting this in Wordpress isn’t easy if it’s even possible.
Drupal is a great CMS that could be extended to provide such services - but it’s no easy task either.
If that’s not exactly what you’re looking for, you need to define your requirements better than just “most of my site will be pages”.