What website CMS system would you suggest?

[webindustry]

Hello all! Thanks everyone for making my experience with SEOMOZ so far a great one. There are some really awesome folks here answering questions and we obviously have a great community here.

Question

We host our sites on dedicated servers with Cpanel. We have a new project that will require that users can log in and create a free Website on a sub domain eg.

abc.mainwebsite.com or example.mainwebsite.com

So the end user will be able to provide their choice of a sub domain.

Then the user can create their website, upload their logo and so on for the free site. (Content management controlled by them)

What software would you suggest we use for providing this free service?

Thank everyone!

[Malarowski]

Wordpress or Joomla strike me as the obvious choices. Both are free and really easy to use.

[smstv]

Definitely Wordpress, themes are in-expensive, and plug ins are very easy to manipulate, server side.

[kpaulin]

From your brief explanation, I'm not sure that you can achieve what you want without utilising a more robust framework than WordPress or Joomla or other "open source" solutions - maybe Silverstripe ...you need a fair amount of System Admin "grunt", UI controls and security to achieve what you are describing in a scalable size.

If you do head down the Open Source path, then WordPress is the way to go - they have a "below the radar" Multisite solution that provides Network Administration functionality - you can find out more here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

You will also need to add in:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/multisite-user-management/

Again, this is really a "work around" for multiple WP sites...I'm still not convinced that this will really deliver what you need...

Hope that helps...

[waqid]

Is this for social networking, business, blogging?

MU Wordpress

Elgg

Joomla (maybe but it can get complicated)

[webindustry]

Thank you for a well thought out answer. I look forward to repaying the favor.

We are researching the options you presented and I will post the results here once we know which software we choose.