Yet another Which CMS

product feed driven site with feature comparison

[aruns]

Hi,
I would like to build a product feed driven site for a niche with a few hundred thousand products with charts/tools/graphs to compare products on different parameters. The key considerations are

1. SEO Friendly
2. Intuitive and easy to use (I am not a coder but am familiar with basic PHP)
3. Ideally an open source CMS platform.
4. Flexible enough to add features such as user ratings/comments etc.

I will have someone set this up for me but maintenance and day to day management will be managed in-house.

Keeping the above in mind what would you guys recommend? I have no experience in CMS/E-Commerce sites so would appreciate any help.

Thanks in advance.

[freelancer]

You will more than not receive a lot of recommendations on many different CMS's . I myself am playing around with several and have had some experience with Joomla,Drupal,Wordpress and a few others .

I would off the bat say that Wordpress probably meets your requirements more so than any I am familar with.

It is SEO friendly and very easy to use.
It is open source and flexible.

The others Joomla and Drupal are not very intuitive as far as I am concerned but thats just my opinion.

I like to dabble in some web design so currently am still looking for that CMS that fits my needs . Currently I am checking out Modx as well as CMS Made Simple and Silver Stripe .

I would suggest you might download Silver Stripe and a few others and check them out on either your localhost or hosting account.

[aruns]

Many thanks, actually I was thinking of Joomla, I will take another look at Wordpress. I did not consider Wordpress initially as I thought it was a blog oriented cms. How easy will it be to customise WP to my needs? How easy would it be allow the user to select & compare product features across categories, or user selected products etc.?

[ergophobe]

There are lot's of "magazine" style themes and "storefront" themes for Wordpress. It can look pretty much however you want.

Ditto for the other ones freelancer mentioned. Your requirements are really basic, which means most systems will handle them well, so I would go with the simplest system (of the ones mentioned, that would be wordpress).

You might want to bump up if you want more complex workflows and user roles (i.e. articles need to go from a "submitted" queue when "authors" are done, at which point "editors" can go over them and move them to an "edited" queue at which point admins approve them, set a publication date and put them in the "publish" queue). Actually, I think Wordpress could actually handle that workflow (not sure), but it does not have fine-grained permissions.