Choosing a CMS to Run Your Membership Site

When I first started the WebBriefcase.net site, my first choice for managing content was Wordpress. At the time though, Wordpress was just not powerful enough for what I had in mind i.e. run a video tutorial membership site. So, I moved to Joomla. Although Joomla was simple enough to learn and did many things that I wanted it to, I found it too ‘bulky’. Adding content took just way too much time for this impatient webmaster.

So, after reading as much as I could about content management systems, I finally settled for Drupal. After a year or so of running my site on Drupal, I now find myself switching back to WordPress.

Time to share my experiences.

Why Use a CMS for a Membership Site?

There are many reasons to use a CMS for a membership site. When I say membership sites, I am referring to sites that offer frequently updated content to members.

• Ease of content management
  I guess this one is obvious. With a CMS, you can add, edit, delete, rearrange and categorize your content easily. Without having to worry about any programming or HTML.
• Ease of member interaction
  Getting member feedback is also as simple as enabling comments to giving members the ability to start their own blogs. Having member interaction makes your membership site more active and alive and thus, help you retain your members for a longer time.
  
  
• Ease of site feature update
  You can easily add, delete and updates features to your site without having to worry about reuploading your content.
• Ease of design update
  You can also change the entire design of your site whilst still maintaining your content.
  
  
• Ease of member management
  It is also much easier to manage your members. You can manage their profile and assign them to different access levels. You can group them up.

There are more things you can do but the above should be sufficient to justify the use of a CMS.

Which CMS Is the Best?

This is a not so easy question to answer. It really depends on what you need. So, where do you start? My advice is to look at the open source applications. First and foremost, because they are free. You can try them all out to see which one suits you best without having to pay for something that you may end up not using.

Another reason to go for open source is that you’ll always have access to the latest updated and improved version. In my case, for example, a feature that was not available with WordPress before is now a part of the core and I didn’t have to pay a single cent to get the upgrade.

Having said that, I would recommend that you start off with WordPress. It is simple to install, easy to learn and you can pretty much handle the whole site without any help from designers or programmers. And at this point in time, I don’t see anything that it is not capable of doing, out of the box or via additional plugins.

Recent versions will even allow you to set up different user roles. So, you can set up different membership levels, for example – normal members, silver members and gold members.

The only thing about WordPress is, it is more suitable if you want your content to show up chronologically. So, recent content will show above the older ones. You can still use, what is called the WordPress “pages” to rearrange your content exactly the way you want but it is not as intuitive as using something like Joomla or Drupal.

If you can’t layout content the way you want to using WordPress, you may want to switch to Joomla. Joomla gives you more control over your content. You can group your content into sections and then categories. You can also choose how you’d like to arrange your content listing. You can:

• show just the title
• show both the title and description
• arrange it alphabetically, or chronologically or anyway you want. Just drag to where you want the article to appear in the list and presto

Another great thing about Joomla is the community. If you have any problems, just hop over to the forum, post your question and you’ll get an answer really quick. I’ve had questions answered within a few minutes.

The only thing about Joomla, is that I find it rather bulky. It takes a bit of time to add content. Since it’s been quite awhile since I used Joomla, they may have fixed this though with their 1.5 version. But irrespective of this, Joomla is still a great alternative if you need something more than what WordPress has to offer.

Why I Would Stay Away from Drupal

Finding the Joomla interface a bit cluttered, I wanted something with a “lighter” interface. Having read the ravings about Drupal, I decided to try Drupal. So, I moved over my content to Drupal. Due to it’s simple interface – installing, setting up and adding content did not take long at all. In fact, I was enjoying using Drupal until it was  time to customize it.

I needed my site to look like my blog and forum. I’ve designed my own WordPress theme and customized Joomla templates, so it shouldn’t be difficult to do the same with Drupal, right? Well, wrong!

It was a nightmare. I finally, gave up and hired a professional web designer to do it for me, which costed a few hundred dollars. But I thought, ah well, it’s a one off thing.

Then a bit later, I wanted to rearrange my content in a certain way. The core Drupal application is not very flexible when it comes to content listing and arrangement. You need to install an extra module called “Views”. Fair enough. So, I installed Views only to find out that it doesn’t work well with my version of Drupal.

So off I went to the forums for some help. I received replies pretty quickly. The only thing wrong was that they sounded like gobbly goob to me.

At this point, I realized that Drupal users consisted mainly of web developers and programmers who saw the beauty of Drupal from it’s code rather than it’s interface. It was much easier for them to extend the Drupal functions because the “CODE” was clean.

But for someone who doesn’t know how to code, I found it difficult to work with. Don’t get me wrong. Drupal is a fantastic CMS. And if you find it meets your needs out of the box, then by all means use it. But if like me and many other online publishers, you need to tweak it a bit here and there, then you’re better off with something like Joomla unless you have an in house programmer that can do all the tweaking for you.

Having said all that. You should get yourself a CMS to manage content on your membership site. In the next post, I will share with you what plugins and addons you will need to run a membership site using a CMS. Till then, I hope this post has shed some light on your decision on choosing the right CMS.

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Tagged as: CMS, drupal, joomla, Membership sites, WordPress