I may soon be producing a site for a magazine. That a firend of mine runs. What would you suggest I use to produce the site? I am comfortable with HTML/CSS and my friend would be happy to pay me for regular site updates. However whenever I browse the forums it looks like wordpress seems to be the prefered method for magazine style sites. Can anyone tell me other than the CMS side of wordpress and editors being able to upload their articles etc... are there any other benefits to using wordpress for a magazine site as opposed to a plain non CMS website?
AFAIK the only advantage of CMS blogs over normal sites is just what you mentioned: the convenience that people not learned in HTML can make their contributions without bothering tech people. Even for tech people is a great convenience to have a way to quickly publish some type of information. There is another side of blogs that is also useful: they usually have built-in ways to divulge the posts that you make.
Wordpress with a solid magazine oriented theme to base your site design on. You'll get lots of flexibility and some great SEO and functionality out of the box. No need to reinvent the wheel.
i think wordpress would do justice for your concept and i am really leaning towards it because i have plans of making wordpress layouts and it is indeed the best cms for blogs
Another concern of mine is, I am no expert at wordpress or Joomla and along with the site creation im going to spend a lot of time following tutorials and do a great deal of learning. Sounds lazy but I don't really want to learn wordpress inside out if this is going to be the only time I use it as Joomla obviously has more possibilities. If im going to learn one shouldn't this be it.
wordpress won't take you long to learn if you are tech savvy. 1 day and you will know it fairly well. What takes a lot of time is getting lost in looking over all of the plugins.