Choosing a CMS for small business, multilingual website

Funglegunk

Hi all,

I don't know much about the strengths and weaknesses of the various CMS platforms and currently doing some research to decide which is best for our company. I can find plenty of 'feature charts' with 'Yes's and 'No's beside features but I know this can be dodgy way of deciding which to go far. I'm currently looking at the big three, Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress. Should I be looking deeper?

The website is for a small technology business and it must be robustly multilingual as we cater strongly towards the localisation industry. The timeline for completion is about 2.5 weeks from now, and I am not an experienced web coder (I suspect this might rule Drupal out).

Just wondering if anybody has first hand experience and hopefully some advice on using CMS platforms to build a similar site?

p

The timeline for completion is 2.5 weeks, you're not an experienced web coder, and you've no familiarity with the CMS you're going to eventually choose.

2.5 weeks is not a realistic timeline for this project.

nellyshark

What are your exact requirements other than it must be robustly multilingual?

was.deevey

I completely agree that 2.5 weeks is completely unrealistic given you have no experience with any of the above mentioned CMS.

BUT in answer to your question, I find Joomla! fantastic and worked great for a Portugese / Chinese / English / Tagalog site I did a while back Right Outta the box.

What other requirements are there though e.g. Online Shop, User Levels, Form Types, CRM and Ticketing integration etc ....

I suspect you might need to get someone with experience in on this given the timeframe.

ukdirect

I will prefer wordpress as a CMS because -
*Wordpress free and open source
*Lots of plugin and tweaks available for free , you can easily use it
*Very helpful forum support available if you find any problem
*wordpress is best for Search Engine Optimization , you may rank quicker in many search engines
*As you said" I am not an experienced web coder", I will recommend to use Wordpress because it is very easy to use , even if you are a non-tech person ,you can handle it .
*easy to install on web server and easy to use and modify.

Funglegunk

Thanks for the replies guys.

p wrote: »

2.5 weeks is not a realistic timeline for this project.

nellyshark wrote: »

What are your exact requirements other than it must be robustly multilingual?

was.deevey wrote: »

BUT in answer to your question, I find Joomla! fantastic and worked great for a Portugese / Chinese / English / Tagalog site I did a while back Right Outta the box.

What other requirements are there though e.g. Online Shop, User Levels, Form Types, CRM and Ticketing integration etc ....

We're going with Joomla. I've picked a suitable theme, have all of the graphics assets and copy left over from the previous site and the new intended site isn't massive: About 15 pages with articles, photos, some attached PDFs and one embedded video.

I should also mention that while I said I'm not an experienced web coder, I don't mean that I've never seen a line of code in my life! I code in Actionscript at work and have built small HTML sites with CSS stylesheets, but have no experience with PHP or with the various CMS platforms mentioned.

The idea was to pick a CMS, purchase a suitable theme, download and apply it, plug-in the graphics and copy and do any code adjustments necessary (this is what I thought would make up the bulk of the time), and localise it for 2 languages using a third party plug-in (its looking like this will be JoomFish), surely 2.5 weeks is a suitable timeframe for this?

Trojan

2.5 weeks is well doable if you have someone who knows the CMS inside out, you have a good designer on hand, you have the content ready (graphics, photos and text), and you don't need any kind of committee to sign off on it.

p

Funglegunk wrote: »

I should also mention that while I said I'm not an experienced web coder, I don't mean that I've never seen a line of code in my life! I code in Actionscript at work and have built small HTML sites with CSS stylesheets, but have no experience with PHP or with the various CMS platforms mentioned.

The idea was to pick a CMS, purchase a suitable theme, download and apply it, plug-in the graphics and copy and do any code adjustments necessary (this is what I thought would make up the bulk of the time), and localise it for 2 languages using a third party plug-in (its looking like this will be JoomFish), surely 2.5 weeks is a suitable timeframe for this?

Ahhh, given this information, I'd say it's tight, but possible. If you're going with an off the shelf template then it'll cut down the work immensely, as opposed to a custom job. The devil is in the details, and the details will depends on if you can make your schedule!

(do post it up when you get it done!

Funglegunk

p wrote: »

Ahhh, given this information, I'd say it's tight, but possible. If you're going with an off the shelf template then it'll cut down the work immensely, as opposed to a custom job. The devil is in the details, and the details will depends on if you can make your schedule!

(do post it up when you get it done!

Will do. It will be a thing of beauty I'm sure! Thanks for replies guys.

Trivarion

When it comes to Joomla (and indeed any CMS) be very very wary of third party plugins/extensions. See http://docs.joomla.org/Vulnerable_Extensions_List for example.