I think Drupal is best long-term, as it's more customizable, and you can extend it further later if you want... but to be perfectly transparent, WordPress will do EXACTLY what you want, RIGHT NOW, and it'll be fairly easy to set up. I've never themed WP, however, so I can't speak to how easy it is to get it looking like you want it.

Tony

I agree that Drupal is the best long term CMS out of what I call "The big three." (Those being Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress.)
Also, Wordpress is fully capable of doing everything you want much easier and faster.

Drupal is the most powerful and flexible, but it also has the steepest learning curve. It is arguably the ugliest out of the box.
Wordpress (I consider) the least powerful and flexible, but it has the best and easiest learning curve.
Joomla falls somewhere between Drupal and Wordpress.

I too am just starting down the CMS path and I have chosen Drupal for its flexibility and community support and user management. Plus, the way Drupal works just seems logical to me.
Let me tell you, it is not easy.... but I am making progress.

If you will be building the site yourselft and you are facing a deadline, I might stay away from Drupal.
But, if you are willing to pay to have someone (like Rob) help you build the site, or you don't have a strict deadline, I think Drupal might me the best long-term solution.

Based on what I'm reading so far it sounds like something I should consider is to use WordPress for this initial redesign, but long term consider moving to Drupal as I learn it.

The backstory here is that our church has been working on different building plans over the last few years (building vs. buying). After several failed buys we were on track to build when a building came open suddenly that is an awesome provision of God and it will happen FAST (this all started just about 3 weeks ago and we should be in this new building on Easter Sunday). So we need a new and fresh site to reflect the new building etc. Plus, as my original post stated, I was never a fan of the current design (even though I did it) and any excuse to move on is good for me. :-)

Because I need some really rapid development it seems like I should throw all my efforts toward WP for now, but once that site is up immediatly start looking at Drupal (or Joomla or...) as the next iteration.

However, I am VERY INTERESTED in hearing other thoughts and opinions. Please keep 'em coming! I've found a lot of info on the various CMS's but its hard to find something online that really helps you compare what is best for your personal situation...I guess that would be because there is no perfect solution, only the one you can best implement given your own unique situation. But hearing other peoples thoughts and experiences helps me get a handle on my own situation. Keep it coming!

Thanks,
Chris

Try Drupal. Out of the box you get your static pages and a blog. Setting up a podcast is a little more work, but g&g tutorials / videos will go a long way.

The most difficult thing is finding a theme that you like, but spend a couple hours on themegarden and you might find something you'll like.

I'm not sure if you've already read this thread on wordpress themes for churches, but here's the link to it here. The second post has a link that will take you to a list of a couple hundred live examples of churches using wordpress and what they look like. Hope that helps!

Actually the theme, and tweaking it up front is the thing I'm most worried about. THere's nothing extremely technical on the site but I do know this site will get the thumbs up or thumbs down based purely on how it looks. I know they are getting a new church logo done and once thats done the site design will need to be based on it.

What I had read on here and other sites is Drupal is harder than WP to tweak a theme for your own use. Maybe thats not true? Not sure. Like I said, rapid development will be factor here too.

-Chris

I think that's what it comes down to. WP is very easy to theme and there are a lot of themes available that can be easily tweaked. From what I've seen and read theming Drupal is harder. WP will do what you want to do now. Who knows what it will be capable of in 2-3 years? The other thing you need to consider is if you want to change platforms in a few years. That could be a big project.

I think you'll always get a lot of opinions - especially between those who don't really know Drupal, and those who virtually live in it(!). I am one of the former (preferring Joomla), but when I was looking at what CMS to focus on years ago, it was really helpful to go to the Open Source CMS site (http://php.opensourcecms.com/), where you can try out the different systems, create 'real' content, mess around etc.

My recommendation would be that, after trying an introductory tutorial, whichever interests or excites you more (for reasons of simplicity, appearance, flexibility, coolness, or whatever) should be the one you pursue, unless you quickly find a big show-stopper.

Wordpress was designed to be a new-generation blogging platform, but with a good theme, it can become an adequate but basic CMS. Drupal and Joomla are more heavyweight dedicated CMSes, so if you have big aspirations for your site, it's probably better to start with one of these, with a good template/theme that sets up most of what you want to begin with, and learn as you go.

Good 'luck' :-)
Alan

I can't really speak about the difficulty of tweaking Joomla or Wordpress, but the difficulty level of tweaking a Drupal theme is more dependent upon the theme you choose than Drupal. Some themes are easy to tweak, e.g., NewsFlash, some are more difficult (Zen, I believe), some may have almost everything you want "out of the box" (Tapestry can be particularly good looking).

One site that I now work on uses a theme based upon Combustion (a theme that hasn't been updated for Drupal 6). What really makes this site shine (I didn't do it) is the header image that sets the overall look. I've been thinking about how I'm going to move this to Drupal 6 later this year and I think that I'll probably use either NewsFlash or Tapestry as the underlying theme.

One of the nice things about Drupal is that you can put up a site with one theme, and develop another theme (as long as they don't share the same name) concurrently.

Your time requirements might mitigate against this, but I've always disliked the idea of putting up something (like Wordpress) knowing that it'll need to be replaced (soon) by another product. Changing a Drupal theme on a site is trivial compared with converting from one platform to another.

If your church is designing a new logo, are you using an internal designer? If so, you may be able to get some design work done for the site concurrently thus simplifying your conversion.

Just my 2¢ worth, good luck,
Curt

FYI: Here is a nice, unbiased Drupal vs Joomla review:
http://www.topnotchthemes.com/blog/090224/drupal-v...

Hi Arlin,

thanks for the link. I think this is overall a good summary of features/shortcomings of Drupal and Joomla, since I've heard the same kind of comments to varying degrees many times before. However, note that this reviewer is trying to find something suitable for internal enterprise use, so his/her requirements are going to be fairly different to those for a small business or church for example (his focus is on integration, scalability, multi-tier deployment, etc.).

But - I think the review still provides a good overview of what is offered. If I was going to build a CMS for an enterprise department, I would seriously consider investing (a lot of) time into learning Drupal, because the extra power would be appreciated there. For our needs (building small low cost websites for small businesses and churches), the quick setup, customisation and deployment of Joomla is a big advantage - and our clients are delighted with the ease of use and shallow learning curve. They are usually escaping an old 'static' style site, so the absence of CCK and content nodes in their solution is not missed :-)

Horses for courses... (http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/horse...)

Alan.

A few years ago, back when the WordPress blogging platform first appeared, it seemed to me to be a very good solution for blogging. Accordingly, for a few years I ran a blog using WordPress. But then the philosophy of WordPress shifted, with the promise of many new and exciting features. Regrettably, the cost of the change was a significant increase in complexity. An old adage admonishes, "Better is the enemy of Good Enough."

Recently, a new release of WordPress has been coming out every few months, with the result that maintenance of the blog had become a logistical nightmare. While installation of WordPress is simple, automated, and quick, it is no simple, automated, and quick matter to update a WordPress installation. Much more is required than simply backing up the data base of the blog and restoring the data to the new installation. All of the customization which the user has added to the old version must be edited into the configuration files of the new installation.

Having goals in life which preclude the devotion of an entire day every other month or so to the configuration of a new WordPress installation, I began shopping around for a STABLE blogging platform.

The best alternative to WordPress which I thus far have found is MovableType. My hosting outfit does not provide an automated (via Fantastico) installation of MovableType, as it does for WordPress. But it shall be a relief to be free from the burden of maintenance which use of WordPress necessitates.

Here it is nearly 2 months later...in this time I've worked a good bit with Wordpress and overall I like it. I'm working on my first customer site using WP and for this particular client the only drawback I've found is that their hosting is windows and WP seems to run VERY slow, at least on this hosting (web.com). As far as WP itself though I've been very pleased with it thus far.

-Chris

Here's an article it may be worth looking into:
The 3 Easiest Ways To Speed Up Wordpress

In fact, Lorelle has a ton of great information about WordPress and I'd recommend that site as a first-stop for anything you need to know.

Of course, there are the WP caches too, but I am not a fan of caches... they have bitten me too many times in the past (non-WP).

Hope it helps!