What CMS would be best for the following sites?

Hi guys, I have experience with C# and Java, but none with web development and CMSs for now, I have enough time to learn what is needed however. I would like to inquire your opinion on what free CMS would be best to use for the following 2 sites, separately of course. My only requirement for the CMSs is that there are good video tutorials for them, as I find this to be fastest way for me to learn something new.

  1. An online library where anyone can publish his works - books, stories, comics or any other form of written content. They will be free to download, but authors can receive donations for them, from which the site will take a small commission. So basically something like a book store but with no shopping cart, with donations, users can upload books and receive money. Users can also invite others to publish their works and receive 1% of their donation - something like a very basic referral system.
    This one will probably require a lot of custom work too, but still which CMS would give me the best start to work with,

  2. A combined news and deck sharing site for a digital trading card game. Something like Hearthpwn, but simpler.

If you’re experienced with C#, you can look into Umbraco or DNN. There are plenty of plugins for both of them, but also easily extensible if you don’t find what you want. I prefer Umbraco, but that’s just me.

Other than that, Drupal or Joomla should get you where you want, but both have pretty steep learning curves.

Thanks for the help, narrowed it down to 3 - Umbraco, Orchard or Nopcommerce would be best in your opinion for the specific sites?

Sorry. I can’t help you there because it’s going to come down to plugins and personal preference. I would download them all and start playing to find the one you like best.

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as you seems to be a programmer, so in my opinion for both learning and your website requirements you may go with php and wordpress.

Not to be rude, but WHAT?

Tsekov stated he was familiar with C# and Java. Why in the world would you tell him to learn PHP and wordpress? How does that make any sense what so ever?

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Wordpress is best site for CMS & WordPress is the #1 most popular CMS platform in the world, and the easiest way to manage your website content.

I’ll say the same thing to you that I did to ahmad_ali…WHAT?

Yes, Wordpress is popular. Is it the best choice for everyone? Absolutely not.

So, other than it being popular, what reasons do you have for telling him to use wordpress? Are there plugins which will give him exactly what he’s looking to do? If so, what are they?

I would argue that IF Tsekov wanted to learn a whole new language (PHP), Drupal and Joomla would be better choices as they were developed as a CMS first. But even then, I don’t see what they offer that would give Tsekov such incentive when there are C# based packages (which he already knows) that he would be better equipped to customize to meet his needs…

Although learning PHP and WP might not be a bad idea in the future, for the current projects it just doesn’t seem appropriate - why spend time learning something that isn’t even that good for these sites - they require a lot of custom functionality, which will probably be hard to add with WP. Umbraco seems a good choice ,since at least from what I read about it, it should be a very custom functionality friendly CMS and I can’t find plugins for most of what is required for the other CMSs anyway.

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