What a variety of CMSs there are to choose from! I’ve been playing around with a few to make the site better and a guild / community portal worth visiting. Each one has its good and bad points. Take a look at the samples I’ve been working on:
ocPortal
Joomla
Drupal
e107 (and of course ViR’s old site)
And of course this site is currently powered by WordPress.
ocPortal may look a bit bland, but that was a 40 minute setup and resulted in a fully functional portal site with integrated forums, shoutbox, and gallery. Additionally, the setup included a “theme” wizard where you set a seed colour that automatically calculates colours across the site based on that seed.
Joomla is an active project that is very popular with the “guild in a box” hosting sites. There are a few gaming plugins for it, but most are for older versions and need to basically be re-coded to work with the latest version. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past week or so — that, and trying to figure out how the darned thing goes together. It’s a bit difficult to use on the back end and I find myself wondering if it would almost be easier to hand-code a site. Also, all the best templates seem to be For Profit. This is one of the slickest themes I’ve seen to date.
Drupal is very clean and active, but the integrated forums are a bit meh and lack good user control.
e107 had everything I was looking for, but the themes and project are very outdated by now. In addition, the developers are leaving the project. Makes me sad.
WordPress is what we’re using for now, but no good forum integrations and the fact that this is still really a blog-based product make me want to look around at what else is available.
Let me know what you think!
-Tep.
