I will soon be required to take on a project whereby a company want to redo their entire websites, infrastructure and cms. I’ve used many cms systems such as Teamsite, Alfresco, Magnolia etc and all are great but costly. The company gets roughly 2million hits a month across 9 sites and there are 50 content editors. What are peoples thoughts on using something like Joomla or Drupal? They are free which would keep the costs down and seem to tick all the boxes. Are these types of open source cms systems used by large companies or are they mainly for small companies. Don’t want to go this route if in fact its not right for large scale projects like this. Any thoughts on this would be much apprecaited. Thanks in advance.
If you have the money, then look into Cascade Server (by Hannonhill)
Not free, but I use it at my work (very very large website) and it’s been instrumental. Combining it with a framework like Foundation or Bootstrap, you can create templates for all pages It’s very dynamic and can do everything you need (most likely.)
Again, that’s if you have the money to be buying it (and they give free training), which from the sounds of it, you might.
For what it’s worth, almost any reputable open source CMS can be used effectively for large platforms. Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal. All of them have customers that have huge websites/platforms. It matters more, I think, how comfortable you are setting up, optimizing, and supporting each. If you know which plugins you need, and what sort of support, themes, etc you need.
The advantage, in my mind, to buying proprietary corporate is that you have the support to fall on. That’s really what you’re paying for in those cases, often not really features at all, or not ones you couldn’t reproduce elsewhere. But if your open source platform has an issue, you or someone else will have to find and diagnose and fix it (with the help of the huge community, but still you) whereas with proprietary software hopefully a support team can answer your questions and help you fix the issue.
That said, I love open source solutions so /shrug
Hopefully that opinion was of any small assistance.
Thanks so much for the feedback guys - much appreciated. So as I will have an in-house team what about the idea of using php with Symfony as the frame. This would keep us in full control and we could customised as we need to. I know I would then be relying on my developers and wouldn’t have any external support, but other than that can anyone see any drawbacks of this approach? thanks again
Without knowing all the details Drupal 8 sounds like a good platform for this. it even runs on many Symfony components. Currently in beta but I’m sure by your launch date there will be a release candidate out. Given 50 content editors it seems like your going to need a system with very rich content editing features from design to content. If so Drupal is 8 fare beyond anything else in existence. Especially when the Drupal 8 version of panels and commerce becomes available. I’m also thinking that continuous integration is a very important concern for you. If so Drupal 8 has a completely reworked configuration system that stores configuration in flat files and easing the pain syncing configuration and structural settings between various environments. The system uses the Symfony yaml components. There isn’t even a contest in comparing the power and architecture of Drupal 8 to Wordpress or Joomla. However, Drupal being so powerful isn’t for the faint of heart and there is a learning curve much more so than something like Wordpress.