CMS. What are colleges using?

[Darren Ladner]

OK. This is my first week on the job and my overall long term goal is a complete website redesign. I would like to use a CMS. I am a big fan of Joomla and I have pretty good experience with it. I just wanted to shout out to everyone and ask: "What CMS are you using, why and what are some pros and cons of the system that you are using?"

[Darren Ladner]

Sam, beside Joomla I have used DotNetNuke also and I have experienced the same type of issues with DNN. Installation. I have had huge issues and a lot of wasted time trying to install DNN and trying to get it up and running. Once I have it installed, it runs awesome and I love working with it. But since it is such a pain to even get it going,I have recently turned to Joomla. DNN is a great product and I love to use it, I just wish they could figure out an easier way to do installs. I am more of a programmer and designer than a computer network guru so that might be one of the reason I have trouble with my DNN installs.

[Dirk Herr-Hoyman]

Let me throw out a couple more tools that have large usage in higher ed
and then do some comparisons.

Wordpress- We've been getting some good results with WP on smaller sites
for online newsletters and a news service. Easy to setup and easy for users
to update "posts". I've also got some private orgs I'm working with as a
volunteer that are using WP.

Google Sites- While I know that the high end designer community pretty much
dismisses Google Sites, in terms of being good in a 80/20 kinda way and also
being hosted in a way that won't keep you up at night, this is one to consider.
Would make the most sense if your university was signing up for as a
Google Apps for Education site.

This makes the list being discussed here Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, OmniUpdate and Sites.
There's lots of reasons pro and con to do any of these, my point is that this is a pretty good
range of what the choices are (and there are lots MORE too).
Here's an article which talks about WP, Joomla, and Drupal,
http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal... and it makes many
of the points that have been posted in this discussion already.

Do I have a favorite? Well, I'm watching Sites pretty closely, as cloud services is the next generation
of computing services, but Sites is not there yet on a robust permission and is still a bit cookie cutterish.
I do tend towards a simple-is-good approach, even though I know all the programming languages
and have forgotten a few more as a long time computer science guy, and it's also got to work for
your users if you expect to push the updating out to them, so OmniUpdate and WP would score high
for me on those aspects. If you get into Joomla or Drupal, then you are getting into a larger staff and
more refined skills, which is fine if you have that type of expertise and funding to support it.

My $0.02USD --Dirk

[Patrick Powers]

We recently tested Joomla vs. Drupal and arrived at some of the same conclusions as previous posters. In the end, with as large as we need the site to be, we settled on Drupal. It has yet to be seen if we've made the right decision. I'll get back with you in a couple of months.