CMS comparisons for tech site - WPress vs Joomla vs Concrete5 etc

CMS & WordPress
1

I’m thinking of creating a technical information site of about 200-500 pages with lots of image based how-tos. I’ll be the sole admin of the site. I have experience in managing corporate CMSs and a lot of general web dev experience, so I don’t need to stick solely to a simple CMS. But then, no need to put in more effort than is necessary. A CMS that is quick to manage content that can grow with tinkering is what I’d prefer.

The site would have a search engine, run advertisements and perhaps a small online store to purchase manuals via PayPal. And it needs to be mobile device friendly.

I was looking at different CMSs such as Wordpress, Joomla, Concrete5, Drupal and ModX. Without spending months poking around with each one, does anyone have experience in the pros and cons of these related to the purpose of this site?

thanks

2

I would use a Wiki for this, not a CMS.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

Media Wiki is highly configurable and easy to use. Very easy to do quick edits to documentation and great admin control for that. It stays up to date with trend changes (usually mimicing Wikipedia), but you can install and edit your own styles. AFAIK, it’s the leader for Open Source wiki right now.

Advertising Extensions:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Advertising_extensions

3

Thanks - I’ll have a look as I haven’t thought of that, but I’ll see how it compares with the classic CMSs out there.

4

For what you want to do, I think the clear choice would be Wordpress. I have never looked at Concrete5 or ModX. Wordpress will do most (or all) of what you need to do without any major work involved. As for the online store part, I know there are Wordpress plugins that offer such functionality though I have never used them.

I run across tutorial sites all the time and just about all of them are done on Wordpress.

5

Don’t rule out content systems such as ExpressionEngine or Craft for this sort of content, both will offer:

  1. Proper structured content out of the box
  2. Excellent data organisation with things like categorisation, tagging, statuses, search, filtering, multiple views, content relationships and so on
  3. Easy to limit any content behind a login if required
  4. Easy to extend as/when the site/content grows