If ever a question caused web developers to gird on their armor and polish their swords… it probably sounded something like…

Joomla vs Drupal vs Wordpress vs EE vs Other? - Which CMS is best?

Instead of raising the ire of the EE forum users, I’m asking a different question.

Our company is moving into some social type functionality (isn’t everybody) and we want to give users the ability to have and edit their own page.

At this point in time this is not allowed with EE.

One of the restrictions of the EE license is…

You may not… ‘Use the Software as the basis of a hosted weblogging service, or to provide hosting services to others.’

From forum posts, this is more a technical decision as EE was not developed with those functionality goals.

I might add, we are continuing to use EE for our own stuff. We plan on having a separate system that the user community will use and we will probably pull in some content via RSS into our own pages if need be.

Most of us have all tried Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress.

My question to the community is… what is your favorite platform upon which to build a social type web experience?

Currently, I am looking at…

BuddyPress (Built upon WordpressMU)
ELGG
Joomla w/ Jomsocial Extension

Are there any other rising stars that we might consider?

I have used Joomla quite a bit and like it. The JomSocial Extension is a good one so I would head in that direction. But I will say that I have heard a few people say that they were going to try buddypress…. sooo…

m.

I would check with sales if your community ideas fulls under the hosted blogging platform.  If the user pages are just glorified profile pages list all the shared weblogs they’ve posted to then you might be fine… but check with sales.

Joobs - 16 April 2009 05:33 AM

I would check with sales if your community ideas fulls under the hosted blogging platform.  If the user pages are just glorified profile pages list all the shared weblogs they’ve posted to then you might be fine… but check with sales.

Our goals really go beyond glorified user profiles. While they might make an exception to the rule… I really feel like this is something outside the scope of the EE license agreement. We chose EE for administering our own sites and never planned on using it for this next phase of development. We will continue to use EE for our own stuff… that’s for sure!

Our goals really go beyond glorified user profiles

Question is how far? What features are you looking to implement?Forums?Galleries?Individual Blogs?...in other words what features?

Joomla would be the easiest but customizing anything is a pain. Some extensions seem bigger than Joomla itself. Bridges to forums (smf) and galleries(gallery 2) are rather shaky and also written by 1-man-show programmers…generosity is good but not often there when you need it on demand.
For ‘empowering users’ to have ‘my yahoo’ or ‘my msn’ page Drupal might be better (after you accept the fact that it will take some heavy duty php and maintenance of the Drupal core)

Hard to answer depends on your skills, time and goals.
Let me just say that I would like the get a ‘time refund’ from Joomla after discovering EE

lebisol - 16 April 2009 10:49 PM

I would like the get a ‘time refund’ from Joomla after discovering EE

Thats the phrase i was looking for to describe people what joomla did to me. 2 years of timewasting and moneywasting to figur out that this and that can not be done. Joomla is a toy.

A friend of mine recommends Ning http://www.ning.com/ - I had a quick look a couple of years back before we started our church website. Not sure how mature it is certainly but perhaps worth a look?

Steven Grant - 11 July 2010 06:45 PM

A friend of mine recommends Ning http://www.ning.com/ - I had a quick look a couple of years back before we started our church website. Not sure how mature it is certainly but perhaps worth a look?

lol ning is a template based online site builder. not even remotely close to a real CMS.

Hmm, that seems a bit quick, tkco.

Ning actually looks like quite a toolkit for the social side of things, and it’s recently gotten a new business model.

I read that a single signon ability will be in the API before long, and there are now SSO packages coming into view.

It might be that marrying ExpressionEngine and Ning could give a new answer for this ability so often asked for.

It looks like you have freedom to make your own theme and thus brand a Ning network - examples are quite varied, though as with Tumblr they seem to stay near a core Ning functionality.

Another arrangement you might look at is Elgg, which is GPL open source, and has wider functionality including collaborations, as well I think as full customisability. It’s been around a while, initially in the online educational area, and the base site is here: Elgg Curverider.

It looks like both Ning and Elgg have a facebook login capability, and perhaps by combining with Fab-EE you could get essentially single signon without having to build up a CAS or other implementation on EE.

Here’s a feature comparison chart which looks reasonably up to date: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Todd D. - 14 April 2009 03:19 PM

Our company is moving into some social type functionality (isn’t everybody) and we want to give users the ability to have and edit their own page.

At this point in time this is not allowed with EE.

Looking at the requirements you have stated I think you can do this with EE but for praticality it depends on the numbers of staff you have. You could set up a single page template for the users page (because your requirement is a User page - not a user website) and create a channel for each person that only they can edit. I do not beleive this would be contradictory to the Use Terms and Conditions of EE as it would all sit under one website and you would not be trying to sell it as a service.

This technique would also allow full control of the look and feel as any company would want to do.