CMS for online magazine startup?


6

I want to start an online magazine website and I'd like to know what platform to use.

Something like Wordpress, Drupal, and other CMS systems, any recommendations?

Software Technology Website Open Source CMS

asked Sep 22 '10 at 23:54
Blank
Alexandru Trandafir Catalin
157 points
Top digital marketing agency for SEO, content marketing, and PR: Demand Roll
  • You need to spell out what you're looking for. For instance, the answer will be very different if you are looking for publishing workflow support, with different user roles and processes geared to magazine creation, than if your question is mainly about the consumer experience. – Jeremy Parsons 14 years ago

8 Answers


12

WordPress with a free theme such as Magazine Basic installed, is good solution if you are looking to make your magazine publicly accessible and do no want to program.

If you have more specific needs and would have programmer resources available, the Django programming framework can offer a great starting point for building a magazine that is adapted to your business needs. Many online editions of news papers are build leveraging this software.

answered Sep 23 '10 at 00:01
Blank
Ewalk
221 points
  • To add to Wordpress ... there are a TON of good magazine-style themes out there for it. Wordpress really is a nice CMS. – Martin 14 years ago
  • +1 I concur. Drupal is rubbish too. – Aiden Bell 14 years ago
  • Drupal is not rubbish. Wordpress is easy to set up and limited in functionality. Drupal is far more complex to set up, but has far more possible functionality. – Txwikinger 14 years ago
  • @txwikinger - Ok, I will rephrase - "Trying to develop plugins for, or modify Drupal is rubbish and inevitable" – Aiden Bell 14 years ago
  • @Aiden: one aspect of it is that WordPress focuses on ease of use, at the expense of security. In the Drupal world, the directory containing all your scripts should be locked down so that PHP scripts can't modify it at all - ideally, they can only alter the "files" directory where file uploads go, and /tmp. In WordPress, my understanding (I have never used it) is that you won't get far if WordPress's installation directory is not writeable by the website process. – Chris Morgan 13 years ago

3

I believe that WordPress is your best option, and you can even check out the WordPress Stack Exchange site for answers to questions you have once you set up your site. As far as a theme to use, I suggest looking at StudioPress themes, their service is outstanding! WordPress is the most popular CMS being used, and because of this, I think offers the most options and access to assistance.

answered Sep 26 '10 at 10:17
Blank
Marna Friedman
31 points

2

Probably you will need something more sophisticated like Drupal or Joomla.

You can look for a web publisher software like Krang. It's more specialized.

answered Sep 26 '10 at 09:27
Blank
Bigown
331 points

2

The big difference between something like Wordpress and Drupal is contributing users. Wordpress is more suitable for the sole contributor and Drupal is ideal for multiple contributors. So if you plan to have multiple writers then you really need to go with something like Drupal.

Drupal 7 was recently released and it's quite the upgrade. They worked really hard on usability.

A great way to try Drupal 7 is with Drupal Gardens. It's a hosted solution by Acquia (founded by Mr Drupal himself). You can have a site up and running within minutes for free. Their pricing is very reasonable if you grow out of the Free plan or you can export your site and host it somewhere else at any time.

I think you should ignore religious arguments about PHP, Ruby, Python etc. Your starting a magazine not a software company. So you need to focus on getting the right tool to solve your needs. Programming language really doesn't matter.

Frameworks will give you a little more flexibility to do anything you want but you then also have to do everything. That flexibility would allow you to do bad things just as much as good. You'll spend valuable time and money developing very common components that have been done hundreds of times before. Using a tool you'll get the benefit of thousands of hours of other developers optimization and as long as it's open source your really not giving up any flexibility. Underneath any tool is a framework and programming language that you can tweak until your heart is content.

answered Mar 2 '11 at 03:41
Blank
Darrenp
21 points
  • ACtually it is pretty easy to have multi users in wordpress installations. I help with the techs of a small mag with several writers on wordpress and there is no problem. – Christian 13 years ago

0

My favourite for this stuff is Silverstripe -- PHP-based with immense flexibility around custom article types (adding additional metadata / fields to an article -- a traditional weak point with things like Joomla). See demo

answered Sep 27 '10 at 14:09
Blank
Julian
201 points

0

drupal / joomla are better suited for magazines - finer grained control of pages, sections, content blocks, modules. Wordpress is easier, and magazine type templates abound, but once you get started you'll hit article placement limitations pretty quickly. Start considering a gallery, directory, classified section - and then you start to push wordpress well beyond its initial capabilities.

Don't get me wrong - wordpress is great. But use the right tool for the right job - joomla, drupal, silverstripe all are much more than a blogging system.

answered Jan 6 '11 at 14:26
Blank
Jim Galley
9,952 points

0

Wordpress is great for this application. Get a magazine oriented theme and you've got a solid out of the box magazine site.

If you will have user contributed content however, you may want too look at Joomla or Drupal.

answered May 6 '11 at 02:44
Blank
Sam
509 points

0

This is a really old thread, but I thought I'd throw in my two cents:

Use Wordpress and a premium theme from ThemeForest. Here's a link to magazine-style layouts. There's about 150 that you can preview.

answered Mar 1 '11 at 08:54
Blank
Andy Cook
2,309 points

Your Answer

  • Bold
  • Italic
  • • Bullets
  • 1. Numbers
  • Quote
Not the answer you're looking for? Ask your own question or browse other questions in these topics:

Software Technology Website Open Source CMS