To CMS or Not.?

Professional site question

[TomEEE]

I'm lookin for any advice or help on whether or not my site should be using a CMS or not.

I'm mainly thinking about "Mambo" since Im using Plesk and its super easy to install for me.

My site has a lot of content; written and media, and it also has an extremely popular forum (usually about 100 people on at any given time). I think having a CMS would be really nice, that way I could have moderators for content (just like moderators for my message board). It would make a lot of things better and easier, mainly more intergrated.

But would it add a lot of stress on the server? CPU and Memory usage-wise?

Also, is it ok for a professional and serious (or atleast thats sorta what were going for) site to be using a CMS like Mambo? Seems like most professional popular places probably have a CMS, but they dont have any copyrights or such at the bottom of their pages...

I remember talking to one person about a certain site, and he said it looked like it was using PHP Nuke and he said it like an insult...

What are your experiences with CMS and your thoughts about using such software on a professional site?

[jo1ene]

Check out Drupal.org I highly recommend a CMS, mostly because it integrates a lot of features like new story management, email this page, forums, etc and allows for growth. If you're already anaging a forum and such, Drupal probably wouldn't tax your hardware much more.

Drupal is very lightwieght and well coded compared to Mambo. And there's a lot of very competent people in the community available to do cutomizations. PHP Nuke is also a cow in my opinion. That may be what the comment you mention was in reference to.

The "professionalism" aparent in a CMS website has not as much to do with what solution you are using but how well it is customized and/or implemented. A clean, decent design and a good variety of resources is what makes a website professional and a good CMS will make both a lot easier to achieve.

[TomEEE]

Taking a look a drupal, I find that the forum that comes with drupal is a major downside.

When users are used to the luxury of a full fledge forum system (currently I use XMB), drupals forum is a major step backward. It looks as if its not even possible to use a different forum with drupal too..?

[Tigrou]

CMS in general are better for managing pages/sites than static systems. If you later on hire subcontractors then you'll have to hire those familiar with Mambo but that's a good thing as you don't have to train them in your sytem.

There are also an array of free tools out there to support Mambo such as 404 SEF (which does url rewrite), TFSforMAMBO (statistics), MOS Link Exchange & the newsletter tool MaMML.

Some good threads on Mambo in WebmasterWorld especially that future Mambo development is iffy for now as the people behind it have split into two camps:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Some others:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]