technob

I decided to build a site. Not just a blog, but a complete site. I opened an account at a hosting provider, and started to play with different web CMS programs, to see which one is best for my plan. The site I plan to build is for physics education (this is what I know), so it it is important to have good rendering of mathematical formula, preferably using Tex. Another demand: the site is going to be in Hebrew. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but the fact that Hebrew is written from right to left means that the CMS must have good RTL support. Fortunately many of the well known CMS do. I almost forgot another important demand: it must be a free (as in freedom) software. That is just the only way I work. I will probably need a forum for the site as well, but this can be handled by a separate program. So here are some of my impressions:

WordPress – I know it well and it’s easy to use, but it’s structure is optimized for a linear blog. Not ideal for what I was planing.

Moodle – a CMS specially built for Educational sites, so you would think it’s the best for my needs. However, after playing with it for some time I found it to be an oddball. The settings were very different from what I’m used to with other programs, and I seemed to get lost too easily with the all the possibilities. I think I need to visit this again in the future, but right now I decided to pass.

Joomla – my feeling was that it was trying to be user friendly to the point that I didn’t have good control on what’s going on. Visually It looks very nice, but I think I didn’t understand the basic idea.

Druple – I really liked it imidiatly. It’s almost as elegant as wordpress (or at least as an older version of it), but much more versatile. I’d like to return to it in the future, but right now it seems a little more than I need.

DukuWiki – I found it really nice and simple to use, but I had some trouble with installing Tex support. I believe it has a relatively small user base, and the development is not as active as some of the other CMS. In any case, I found It is a good option.

MediaWiki – Great, I realy liked it. I expected it to be more complicated than DukoWiki, but in fact it is very simple to install and use. Since I have some experience with Wikipedia, once I had it installed things flow easily.

Conclusion: My choise is MediaWiki for the main part of the site, but I add WordPress as a side blogging platform, and I think I’ll use phpBB for the forum. Now I’m working on the CSS to give them all a similar look. I’ll write about it in the next post.