I am trying to decide which CMS is the best one for my application. I am currently leaning between Mambo and PHPNuke. My needs are simple. Everyone can view the website for free. Paid members are using the site to sell their music. Therefore, paying members will have access to make changes to their space and upload their music. I have tried aMember Pro with Mambo, over a year ago, and it seemed to do what I want. The only complaint was when I used the aMember login plugin, it took the user to the aMember profile page instead of logging them into Mambo. Has this problem been resolved. One thing that is pushing me towards PHPNuke, is that Mambo can't handle multiple user levels. Somebody correct me if I am wrong. I basically want 3 levels, free membership, paid membership and administrator. Thanks to everyone for their feedback. Rick
Drupal & Joomla! In my opinion, I'd say Joomla is the better choice, mostly due to its huge and very active community. You can be sure that Joomla! is going to be around for a long time yet. Joomla is now taking an object-orientated approach, and is approaching Drupal's standard of extensibility. Joomla has won many awards, most recently 2006 Open Source Content Management System Award, and LinuxWorld's Best Linux / Open Source Project. Drupal is also a good choice due to it's speed, extensibility and quality of code - but the community doesn't appear to be as active as Joomla's. Here's a brief list of relative strengths: Drupal Has been around for quite some time and is stable and actively developed Well coded and has an available granular permissions system and a strong eye for security Configuration was a breeze Lightweight installation Plethora of modules and themes Exceptional documentation and has an active and friendly community The node concept is very good Joomla! Very easy to install and use with lots of extensions and modules The documentation is exhaustive and concise Admin user interface is intuitive and powerful The backend of Joomla! is very usable and the WYSIWYG editor the content was nice Seems like it would scale well and provides a lot of customization options Large and active community At the moment, although Drupal is in a more developed state, I'd say Joomla is the more future-proof solution, is easier to use, and has more extensions, plugins and resources etc. That said, I've bought both aMember integration plugins, so I can make the decision later in the future. Here's some resources you could look at: http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ - where you can compare the relative features of different CMS in side-by-side lists. However, it is worth noting that this site is a bit outdated; for example, Drupal 4.7.4 and Joomla! 1.0.7 are listed here, but are both very outdated versions. http://www.opensourcecms.com - where you can actually try out live demos of different CMS. In terms of which would be easiest to integrate with aMember, I'd say Drupal, but that will certainly change in the near future. Click here for discussions of Joomla vs Drupal.