CMS Made Simple Forums

Hello All,

I hope that someone here will be able to give me some useful tips. For starters I should explain that I am quite a newbie when it comes to using CMS. However, I am a very competent programmerr and can handle most things JavaScript, PHP, HTML, CSS, SQL ... . The reason I post is this

I have been approached recently by a consortium of tour guides to develop a very valueable travel related domain that I own - I "kinda" developed the site and then left it to languish while I went away to do "real" programming. Nevertheless, it easily gets 2000+ visitors per day and has a Google Page rank of 6 - for mutual benefit. The long term plan is to have the following

• Multilingual content
• Useful information and tips for the travel destination in question
• Sale of services - hotel reservations, guided tours, transport, translation services... - by members of the consortium

I find myself in the lucky position of having real experts in the field willing to create the content while I manage the background technical issues. 

All of this has got me thinking CMS. I have played around briefly with Drupal and liked it. Other than that I am aware of systems such as Joomla, Wordpress etc. Here is what, I think, I need

• Allow for individual members (the tour guides) of the consortium to register and create an account
• Allow registered members to create personal content which nevertheless retains the overall look and feel of the site
• Allow for multilingual content - the Slavic, Indian, Arabic and Far Eastern languages will all require support (eventually)
• Allow visitors to the site to pose questions to individual members or more generally
• Collect payments (PayPal) for services sold by members
• Allows me to review and approve member content before it goes live

Handling all server side PHP scripting and database issues to manage payments, commissions etc I can handle.  However, which CMS should I use?  I am busy doing a number of other projects so amongst other criteria one that matters is the steepness of the learning curve.

I'd much appreciate any advice.

FredAt wrote: Allows me to review and approve member content before it goes live

This is the only item you may have a problem with.  There are ways to overcome it, depending on what modules you use to build the site.  The CMSMS core does not (and will not, based on recent dev team comments) feature an integrated workflow, and to date no one has released a stable module to accomplish staging/production content.  (There is at least one in the works, but I do not know the timeline.)

FredAt wrote: However, which CMS should I use?  I am busy doing a number of other projects so amongst other criteria one that matters is the steepness of the learning curve.

Since this site is devoted to CMSMS, you're not likely to get recommendations for other systems    Especially in this case, where everything you want can be accomplished within CMSMS.  If you're an experienced programmer, and know or are willing to learn Smarty, you will find the learning curve to be very short, in my opinion.