Which CMS Should Use?

[LuminConsutling]

I have a desinger working on a new webiste and he's suggesting that WP creates design limitations (He's doing quite a bit of HTML 5 I believe...I'm not sure) and obviosly has secruity concerns.

He suggested TextPattern, which I've never heard of. Has anyone had any experience with it?

Also, what CMS are you using (besides WP) that you really like and is SEO friendly?

Thanks

[calin_daniel]

Hi Spencer,

I am a huge proponent of WordPress, and it is (in my opinion) the best SEO CMS available. For starters there are excellent Plugins such as HeadSpace2, and the All-In-One-SEO-Pack, which allow you to manage title tags, meta data, redirects, ect.

WordPress also has other excellent plugins for SEO including SEO Friendly Images, and SEO Tag Cloud. Also, WordPress has awesome sharing widgets such as Sexy Bookmarks.

So in conculsion any design limitations are far outweighed by the overwhelming amount of SEO and sharing widgets available. The real limitations for WordPress is not in the design department it is in the Intranet department. However, if having an intranet is not important then I would say WordPress all the way.

C

[goodnewscowboy]

Hi  Spencer, I only have experieince with 2 CMS's. I was an early adopter of Word  Press so I wouldn't know my way iaround n it at all anymore as it's changed so much. I currently use Joomla 1.5 . It's relatively SE friendly, but then again so is WP theses days (so I've heard) I've also heard the current WP is much easier to customise than the older versions.

What is the purpose of your website going to be? (eg. blog, ecommerce, etc.)

[alfredopalconit]

i think the problem here is, if you longer work with that designer, will you be able to find someone who can work on updating your site powered by textpattern? i think most modern CMSes (like Joomla,Drupal,WP) are now built to be SEO friendly. If you use a CMS you never heard of, it will be hard to update the site in the future.

[LuminConsutling]

Excellent Point.

[LuminConsutling]

The site's going to be used for an SEO consultany.

[LuminConsutling]

If you like at this site and scroll a little beneath the fold you'll see a visual representation of the business process. I asked for a similar visual but the desinger mentioned he wasn't sure if he could do it in WordPress. What do you think?

[Guest]

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[krissy-cca]

I've heard of textpattern but never really used it. It's WP all the way for me. You can chop it and change it to fit your needs and the fact that there is so much support out there when you hit a brick wall there's always someone who can help.

[perfectweb]

I think you might want to consider finding a new designer / developer Creating this type of visual is not a problem in wordpress. It may jsut be that your designer si nto overly confident with wordprss customisations so maybe you need to look for someone who is? I don't have any experience with textpattern, but wordpress could certainly create this type of visual. By the looks if it this is just an ordered list with some CSS styling.

I would certainly recommend go wth wordpress over textpattern for maintainability - if your designer can't continue to support your website for any reason getting someone with textpattern knowledge is going to be much harder than wordpress, plus wordpress has all of the cool SEO plugins that ahve already been discussed by others.

[SCG]

I'm a huge fan of MODX. Integrating custom design is very easy to learn and the community rocks. You have 100% control over all markup output. No "theming" structure to learn like most CMSs.

[reeljerc]

Wordpress for me. There's a great theme designed specifically for customization (weaver), blank themes with no CSS whatsoever so you have total control and the updates/bug fixes and support are consistent.  Joomla is sluggish, even with cache modules and Drupal, which I really wanted to like, is downright annoying.  I've had a support question in their forum for 3 months now with no response.

[SCG]

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[goran_openitsystems.com]

textpattern was all the rave couple of years ago with easy to use templating Designers were free to achieve various looks and  designs with html and no php when wordpress was not know for it flexibility beyond blogging platform. Those were early days of wordpress when it was first ported from b2. since than thanks to open source wp community wordpress and many other far eclipsed textpattern and those benefits that text pattern initially offered. Many will tell you chose a cms per project basis as many are good at one thing while not at other but i will say that with joomla and wordpress and their most valuable asset their ecosistem of devs and plugins you will be hard pressed to find a typensite that you cannot build with these top 2 free cms platforms...

sorry for typos hate typing on my pad

[CenturionSigns]

I really can't sing Wordpress praises highly enough. By far it has given me and my clients the best results from an SEO perspective, as well as allowing even the most basic of users to add and update content. In terms of security, I recommend Sucuri.net which will monitor and fix any hack/virus/malware etc and they provide great advice and support to keep your WP install secure.

[jonmifsud]

The CMS should be up to the designer to use - obviously you as a client should make sure that there is a good product delivery and that the back-end meets your expectations.

I would agree with your Developer that WordPress is very limiting. Whilst good for Blogs and News-oriented websites it was not built to cater for other websites. CMS like TextPattern or Symphony allow much better control on the structure and output, allowing for better dissection re-use of code and potentially better SEO. I've been using Symphony for over 2 years and I've found it brilliant - I can control and make small SEO tasks much simpler, as I structure the data the way I would like it, rather the standard way the CMS thinks is correct.

Note that SEO has nothing to do with the CMS itself, its more about the implementation as done by your developer. Whilst WordPress has some plugins to make this easier it is not necessarily the only and best way.

[dawnieando]

We have sites built in Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and also custom built CMS's.

All of these are search engine friendly.  Wordpress in particular has a number of excellent SEO guidance tools to put you on the right track.

The consensus of opinion from the comments given is that you need to question your web developer's opinions.  Making the wrong choices now will only land you in hot water in the future.

Good luck with your project