Well as some of you may know, I've been playing around with Joomla for a while. I've also gotten really good at it!

Now though, I'm finding Joomla isn't up to it in the way of features. You have to get a component or plugin for almost everything. Seeing as Joomla 1.5 (which is what I'm using) isn't all that old, there aren't enough extensions for it and like none for what I want. Also, most people make them under the Creative Commons license for 1.5, and I don't want stupid little ads all over my site.

With the old version (1.0.13 I think), the world was your litterbox (lol), there are heaps of things to do what I want and they are under the GNU General Public License. I'd rather not use the old version.

So anyway, I'm looking for another CMS that is powerful and has the things I need built in. I need:

Mail forms (for applications and contact and competitions)
Access Control (there will be different "staff" doing different jobs and I only want certain people to be able to edit certain things)
Along with a news article type system, I want to be able to just make single pages where I can just link to them in a menu. I know you can do this with Joomla but it is still an article type thing)
Although it doesn't matter if there isn't, I suppose I can do without it, a table setup for a page, you can set up how many columns and that you want and you can just add things and it will show it in a cell and expand the rows when it need to.
I also need it to do standard things, a poll, a members type thing, customisable menu and that.

Before I go on, I'm going to say that if I knew enough PHP, I would do it myself, but I don't.

I also need to be able to make my own template and be able to put things where I want them. What I like about Joomla is how easy it is to make templates.

Anyway, I found a CMS, Sitellite that seems to be good, I haven't tried it out yet but I think it might do most of what I want! Has anyone here tried and used Sitellite before, what do you think of it?

I've also been looking at ezPublish and thought it looks alright, except the installer is impossible on my own computer, I haven't uploaded it yet.

So does anyone know of a good CMS that does what I want (doesn't HAVE to do the last thing though) and is preferably free or under $100? Don't exactly want to pay if I don't have to though.

Sorry for the long post, I just really need a CMS that's right for me! By the way, PHP and MySQL is preferable, I DON'T want anything with text files!

This post has been edited by Sten: Feb 7 2008, 12:00 AM

Well, this isn't going to be as useful as you were hoping for but I think it is important to say just the same.

You've been spoiled by Joomla!
Joomla is an amazing open source CMS project that owes it's popularity and success to the fact that it has so many extensions developed for it. As you said, the World is your sandbox (litterbox) with Joomla! Due to the ease in which extensions can be developed for Joomla, there are a lot of them and you can do nearly anything. However, as you mentioned, Joomla has some serious limitations.

While it is great that you can display different menu items and modules based on the component requested, this doesn't work if the component "ItemID" is omitted or changed in the URL. The user access control is awful! Since Joomla uses a hierarchal access control structure, You cannot single out a specific user group and display special content just to that group. Also, you can't add groups to the system. This would be slightly less irritating if there weren't only 3 user groups despise the fact that Joomla allows you to put a user in anyone of 7 groups. There are hacks that you can add to Joomla to give you better access control but they are limited and very difficult to install/uninstall and upgrading to a new version of Joomla leaves your life a mess.

You can actually create HTML pages and include them in the website using the wrapper menu item type.

So those were the problems with Joomla. The new issue is component compatibility with the new version which greatly limits the number of usable extensions for Joomla 1.5! I wouldn't mind the lack of backwards compatibility and limited extensions for Joomla 1.5 if they had actually fixed the real issues in the system! Aside from adding a few really cool developer tools and cleaning up the code a bit, the new Joomla is just the same as the old one but less compatible.

So we took the most well rounded free CMS with its annoying flaws and removed all of the extensions that made it useful! This leave us with nothing which is what you have just realized. The upside is that eventually, the Joomla extension developers will write new scripts and Joomla will have even more uses. Until then, you're kind of stuck which leads us to the next point!

There are a lot of really good CMS's out there that overcome the limitations inherent in Joomla. User access control issues are less in most of the CMS's and managing content is of course good no mater what method you use but there is one major issue to consider, extensions. Most CMS's do not have the variety of extensions and ease of extension development which Joomla has so being able to use your new system to do anything outside article management will be much more difficult to accomplish. Don't get me wrong, using a different CMS will be very rewarding and you can extend it by requesting add-ons to be developed but it may cost you extra.

Personally, when I get the time, I'm going to create my own CMS suited to my needs and add extensions as I need them but I know PHP and can do it. For now, I'll stick with Joomla until I either develop my own or switch to a different system.

Like I said, now the super helpful reply you were looking for but important none the less. This should give you something to think about.

vujsa

I'm starting to think maybe learning PHP will be the best thing for me to do! I'd like to start making my own components, plugins and modules. Then I'd eventually like to make a CMS that does what I want and what other people would like!

About the wrappers... why does it use an iframe? I don't know if I could stand an iframe on my site! Couldn't it use an include or a file_get_contents?

Although I'm still going to be looking for a better CMS, I will probably use Joomla until I can find one. It does a great job of what it's meant to do (content management) and that's all they really have to do!

I was reading on the Joomla forums around the thousands of requests for for Access Control Level and they are planning on making Joomla 1.6 where that (and probably bug fixes) is it's main feature.

What I'd really like to get is Bitrix Site Manager (http://www.bitrixsoft.com) but I don't know if I'd really want to pay that much for a CMS on a site that's going to last 2 years tops and it's more for commercial use, not a site for a community of about 3000 people.

So anyway I'll keep on using Joomla and I'm going to start learning PHP again soon, I hope what happened to me with CSS can happen to me with PHP (I just couldn't learn it and once I tried again and it just came to me and I learned like all of it in a couple of hours!). I'd like to make a comments component, forms component, private messenger and an ACL if they don't have one built in by the time I get round to it!

You might want to check out drupal, I only have very limited experience with it and the only thing I can say about it is that it's complex compared to joomla. However, one of the bigger community sites (it's in fact nubmer one) here in Belgium is running drupal and it has proven to be very stable and powerfull. You might want to give it a try .

About the wrapper thing, it uses iframes because it's the most compatible solution, other tricks might break (badly coded or very complex) websites.

I've never liked Drupal, I don't think it's very powerful and it doesn't even come with a WYSIWYG editor, you have to download one! I also find it a bit hard to use, I know how to use it because I tried using it but I didn't like it and I've been using Joomla ever since and I've gotten so good and learned so much about it!

I really like the "garland" theme Drupal comes with though, that's something the developer can be proud of!

Joomla have everthings you need, joomla is powerful and complicated. So if you not need a website with many different functions, you have many other choices. Example e107 cms, eazy portal, Dragonfly and PHP- Fusion. I like PHP-fusion best, it is easy to use, have almost functions one need. Have a easy backup function bakend with i like very much.

I am using new CMS called MODX. It is most promising CMS of 2007 year. You can visit http://cmsreport.com/node/1326 and se by your own. This CMS hav full ajaxed admin control panel. Versy simple and fast. I think it is faster then joomla/mambo and any cms. Visit www.modxcms.com and you can know everythink of it and try it for 100% free.