What is the “best” free CMS for my needs? [closed]

Answer 1

Well, I'd suggest Drupal for any sort of advanced web site. While Joomla! and similar systems are a bit easier to get started with, Drupal's a lot more flexible and extensible.

You want full control over theming? Or user authentication? Access control? Database queries? User picture scaling? Tagclouds?
It's there when you need it :)

Answer 2

Well, as told by Tom Deleu, yes, though Drupal is very capable and strong CMS but it is tough and complicated to work on. Coming to another option of CMS that is Wordpress. Though it is very easy to develop a content based websites with wordpress but with very limited scope and flexibility.

As per your requirement my vote will also go to Joomla. It is very user friendly, optimized and a CMS you can rely on. Small applications as mentioned by you like "mailing system", "File system" etc. suits joomla more than others.

Answer 3

My vote would be Joomla. It has most fot he features you discussed, if not in the core as an extension, component or theme. I've set several up and rarely have to use any coding during setup, plus there's a vibrant community if you need help. It also integrates nicely with other 'best of breed' apps like BB forums, Coppermine photo gallery's and others.

Answer 4

As mentioned by others, Joomla might be a good option for you, although Wordpress may also work (and it's easier). However, I highly recommend that you check out OpenSourceCMS.com, which hosts demos for many of the free and open source CMS's, blogs, forums, shopping carts, etc. For most of them, you can try out both the admin and the frontend. Spend some time looking them over and then when you find some that you like, investigate them further by going to their websites.

Answer 5

I would go with Joomla too, even though I'm a ASP.NET developer. Joomla is very flexible and customizable, so it fills all your need, because of the big community.

Answer 6

I'd vote for DotNetNuke, it's ASP.Net but that saves you the overhead of learning a complete new environment, language and tool just to implement a 'free' CMS, realistically how much is your time worth? It meets all your criteria, and there are currently 600,000 users - which means that you can just get on with it, somewhere someone has already worked on your problems for you.

As for expensive hosting, why not host in another country, I get US$5/month for DotNetNuke in the states, and I code from Australia.