What’s better then WordPress for a large community website? Joomla, Drupal or some other CMS?
I’m also looking for a CMS which can be easily adapted with custom scripts aka plug-ins.
Please state your answer and write why you think it’s better.
CMS for a large community
Bigger/better than wordpress you’re typically looking at Joomla or Drupal (There are others, these are just the most common ones)
Joomla is much much easier to learn than drupal, but in the right hands drupal can be very very powerful (And handle LOTS of users)
Either way you have to learn a new CMS. Besides, just my opinion, very subjective question.
Janus Boye is a CMS consultant who writes a number of insightful articles on problem space. In particular he maintains a shortlist of products based on platform and has an interesting article concerning selection criteria. In short your selection will be driven by platform and, as Boye writes, the other consideration is operating from a position of least doubt concerning what features you need from a given solution – in other words not most features, but rather confidence that the features you must have are part of the solution you pick.
I chose Drupal over Joomla a long time ago because the system is more flexible and the plugins (called ‘modules’ in Drupal) tend to be more modular and less monolithic than with Joomla.
If you want a quick start building a community site with Drupal, check out Drupal Commons, a Drupal distribution (read: Drupal core, packaged with other modules and configuration) that is targeted towards social applications.
You could try Umbraco or SiteCore too
I recommend Boonex Dolphin CMS for a large community website, There is a community edition as well as paid one. It also has large collection of plugins available. for more information please visit
http://www.boonex.com/dolphin/
I would have to tip the scale in the direction of Joomla! And one reason I do that is because of Joomla!’s very popular community extension, Community Builder. With thousands of other extensions it is surely a powerful choice for building a community based website.
The current stable version of Joomla! is 1.5.22 and the next major update 1.6 is currently in beta testing and adds some great new features that were requested by the community and others.
Drupal has a higher learning curve but is probably your best bet for free and open source. I’m also a fan of vBulletin for a paid license (around $300). vBulletin does community sites incredibly well.
Joomla is the one which I prefer.