I'm thinking drupal may be what I need, but since I'm quite new to cms's maybe the simplicity of wordpress would suit me just to get content out there? Here's the description of the site I'm working on (Tentative format): Home page format: The home page will show snippets from every category in the order they were posted ala blog format. Top left block: with Title and tagline. Top right block: Avert, about, and contact Across top. Tabs for HOME, REVIEWS, HOWTO, MODS, LEARN, BLOG, FORUMS Left sidebar 1: Drop down box with "sort by": Most recent, Most read, top rated, most comments, etc. Under this drop down will be 10-20 articles fitting the category chosen in descending order. left side bar 2 (below the first one): Unsure Right sidebar 1: possibly login options right sidebar 2: Adverts right sidebar 3: Probably news snippets mirroring info on main page. Keep in mind the sidebars will likely be persistent, although sorting options could change to sort within the page you are viewing instead of the whole site (like the main page sorting options) All pages will need to tagable to fit into my sorting categories. All articles will need to be rankable. Of course all will have comments, and linkback section, and links for a number of social bookmarking / rss. All articles will have a "discuss this article" link to the forum. Many articles will have a request feature at the top and bottom where the users can request information. These requests will need to be indexable by date so that they can be searched and displayed to other users while they are still "qued" eg. unanswered. That's all I can think of at the moment. [*]Need the ability to add at site admins who can moderate posts, and add new content. So what do you think? Can wordpress handle this type of stuff easily for someone new to cms, with no php or css experience, or would I be better off learning Drupal from the get go? And what about future migration?
I second Drupal. WP is great but Drupal is amazing! I use both but Drupal is way more powerful and scalable.
Drupal can pretty much do everything you want to be done and then some. I just have started to use it recently and it's a breeze!
Drupal is good,...but I think it dont support drop down menu yet. But you want a drop down box. Drupal latest version6 is really very good., but again it lacks good themes.
This is not quite true. Drupal does support drop down menus. Check out http://roopletheme.com. Their themes use son of suckerfish menus which drop down. As for themes, the OP is more concerned with functionality. You can always get someone to do themes for you, but adding functionality is not that easy. Given the choice, better go with a CMS for the functionality it gives you, because themes can always be created.
don't compare drupal with wordpress with such requirements. wordpress is a blogging platform, at least until now. it means you will have to do a lot of customizations to make them look like CMS. I hear many people do use WP for complex websites, read on this articles if you interested in wordpress as CMS: http://codex.wordpress.org/User:Lastnode/Wordpress_CMS http://www.grahamazon.com/wordpress-as-cms/ wordpress is good, easy, user friendly but some of those requirements will be provided by drupal out of the box. and you will only need some modules to make them complete. but its not easy to learn drupal at the first place. it takes days for me to understand its concept. also it supports drop down menus, its only a matter of templates. i have 2 sites running drupal with drop down menus.