Looking for a CMS for a community group

talexb has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Monks,

I manage a web site for a community group. What with one thing and another, I don't have time to keep it updated, leading to some grumbling in the ranks. I'd like to be able to push the work out to a few assorted folks in the community.

Originally, my plan was that I'd write such a monster application myself, but with all the other stuff that takes up my time, this project has been stalled now for too long, so I need to go with Plan B, which is to install something on the account I have with my web provider, pair Networks.

I have installed and used PmWiki, but haven't been thrilled about how it looks. I've heard good things about Django. What I'd like to have is something I can hand out commit bits to a variety of people for a variety of sub-sections of the web site. I'd love it if some of the pages could just run a CGI so I could keep some of the parts of the web site that I've automated.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Update: Sorry, folks, kinda posted that in a hurry -- I've fixed the links.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

Comment on Looking for a CMS for a community group

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Looking for a CMS for a community group by jZed (Prior) on Jun 22, 2007 at 19:01 UTC
I'm with ww. Here are the advantages of Drupal for community groups: broad selection of other community groups who use it and who may have already invented wheels your group needs easy to turn over management of parts of the site to community members and keep other parts under your control easy to plug in many many existing modules or ones you write either in PHP, or if you prefer, in Perl (with a minimal PHP glue to attach the Perl to Drupal) There are many technically better solutions to get #3, and a few which do #2 as well as Drupal but if there's something else that has the extent of #1 that Drupal has, I would like to hear about it. update : Actually, you could use Perl plugins without even the PHP glue ... e.g. you have a Perl Catalyst / Mason / Whatever server and simply make AJAX calls to it from Drupal.	[reply]
Re: Looking for a CMS for a community group by ww (Archbishop) on Jun 22, 2007 at 17:58 UTC
I fear greatly for my reputation ( :-{ ) ) so preface this un-Perlish observation that I mention it because #1_Son swears by Joomla... `a free, open source content management system written with PHP`... and speaks well of Drupal ... `written in PHP`. (cites: wikipedia). On another hand (there are many, here), having resorted to exploring CMSes for a client, I reached the conclusion that most of the folk to whom the client wanted to hand commit bits should not even have been trusted with fingers to turn on their computers. IOW, I am more than just a bit leary of CMS but since you will control who has access, YMMV.	[reply]