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

Answer 1

Ive had some experience with Joomla. Highly customizable, plenty of plugins and one of the liveliest communities in development. It has a great admin panel also.

Answer 2

Joomla! would seem to fit your needs, and I'd also suggest Kunena for the forum (which integrates with Joomla) and DOCman for the file management solution.

Answer 3

Concrete5 is a new Content management system that is excellent. Easily themable, user friendly, great little dashboard for management

and it's open source

Answer 4

I found this PDF report comparing WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone quite helpful when I was asking myself the same question recently. Nice comments with a focus on non-profits - find the comparison summary/recommendation on pp 13-14.

Definitely read the report because it talks about the strengths/issues of each package - given your prioritized list of features, I'd recommend Joomla. I think you can do what you want with reasonable effort and good recent modules like DocMan. WordPress is awesome for a blogging site, but lacks a number (2,3,4,9) of your requirements, and though Drupal is powerful and flexible, it definitely has a steep learning curve. Plone even more so.

Good luck!

Answer 5

As a complete CMS noob, I asked myself the same question. I started with Drupal. Sure you can do lots of things with it. Very extensible and customizable.

But after implementing my first site in Drupal, I decided to create the next one in Joomla, to have a frame of comparison. Conclusion: Joomla is a looooooooooooot easier to get started and takes a lot less time to create a functioning website from scratch. Sure, for very big projects, Drupal lets you customize more, but for the type of project you suggest: I would recommend Joomla...