Needed: advice about free Content Management Systems

Needed: advice about free Content Management Systems


Greetings, everyone. I've been searching for months now for a free reliable CSS to replace the Drupal server we're currently running at Armchair Arcade. The problem is that our host, modserver, is very restrictive about how many simultaneous MYSQL connections we're allowed (25), and Drupal has been giving us fits. We really need to find a more efficient CMS, but we also need a few key features, particularly good support for images (we use lots of screenshots on our sites.) Furthermore, we need built-in support for captions for these images.

After consulting the CMS Matrix, I found several possibilities, but none of them seemed to really do everything we needed. Joomla! probably came the closest, but its wysiwyg editor seemed flaky in Firefox. We've also tried Dragonfly CMS, Game CMS, and CMS Made Simple, but all were lacking in some regard. In the past, we were using e107, but switched to Drupal because we thought it'd simplify things. Using the image and img_assist modules, we are able to do everything we need with Drupal, but the above mentioned MYSQL problems have forced us to find something else. Obviously, we need advanced caching and some way to keep down the # of simultaneous connections on the database. We normally receive about a million hits per month, and 33-35 thousand unique visitors.

Our ideal CMS would have the following features: Very efficient database routines, easy image formatting and captioning (WYSIWYG editing not essential as long as a good preview feature exists), Good user handling and commenting, an intuitive discussion board (preferably similar to phpbb2).

If anyone can suggest a few more CMS's for us to try, I'd really appreciate it!

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Anonymous visitor's picture
Submitted by Anonymous visitor (not verified) on

You wrote:
>>>Joomla! probably came the closest, but its wysiwyg editor seemed flaky in Firefox.

Having used Joomla a bunch, you can choose between at least 2 WYSIWYG editors (and can certainly cut and paste using NVU).

And there is always (gasp) IE Tab as a Firefox extension which lets you run IE as a tabbed Window in Firefox if you are running Windoze or Linux.

Matt Barton's picture

>>Having used Joomla a bunch, you can choose between at least 2 WYSIWYG editors (and can certainly cut and paste using NVU).

How do you do this? I only have two options: TinyMCE and NO TinyMCE. Does this involve installing a plugin, perhaps?

jonesy's picture
Submitted by jonesy on

Dude, if your host isn't letting you get past 25 simultaneous mysql connections, but drupal is otherwise a usable system for you, then SWITCH HOSTS.

I run http://linuxlaboratory.org. I started it in 2001. Since then I've tried/used/scrapped somewhere near 50 different systems. Most of them suck in one way or another. If you already know you like drupal, then find a host that'll deal with it. 25 simultaneous connections isn't unreasonable, but I *would* love to know which routines are causing all the connections. One stupidly written 'foreach' loop could be enough to make 10x the number of required DB connections :-)

brian.

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Matt Barton's picture

Biography

Matt Barton is an English professor at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. He is an advocate of free software, wikis, and the Creative Commons. He also studies and writes about videogames and computing history. Matt also has blogs at Armchair Arcade, Gameology, and Kairosnews.

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