I will be setting up a premium membership site and I know wordpress can do that. Plus, I heard wordpress is seo friendly and easy to manage. However, I have also heard of joomla and drupal and how good they are. Which one should I use?
I highly suggest Wordpress, I've been using it for some time now and I am pleased with the results. I haven't tried Drupal, but I have done some work with Joomla for a bit. I didn't really like it, as the admin interface was hard to get used to and it's hard to customize a design for the site.
These all three remains on Top, but my personal experience says that you should go with wordpress. its easy to use, loads of themes available, Seo friendly and huge no of plugins available.
Wordpress is easy to learn and use, as compare to joomla/drupal. If u want to go for joomla then i will suggest drupal (becoz joomla has quiet complex cp). Joomla and drupal usually uses for portal websites and wordpress is a blogging CMS. Web2.0 is an age of BLOGGING. Wordpress has more huge platform as compare to joomla, more seo friendly, easy to earn/use, navigate. you can customize themes, use plugin or widgets. These things are available in joomla and drupal but wp has a large supporting platform/sites/forums/stuff.
It depend up to your requirements if you need a Blogging related script then Wordpress is only best to provide it and if you looking for a portal then Joomla is best but its modification and use found to be hard at times
If you plan on just blogging and want a low learning curve then enjoy word press. I use it on about 75 sites of mine. If you want a full blown CMS with a heavy leaving curving use Joomla. Joomla has unbelieveable potential to be anything you want but you have to be willing to get into it and learn. I currently run about 125 joomla sites. I don't touch Drupal. I tried once but really was just not interested in it enough to spend my time with it. So simply: Wordpress=easy to use and learn Joomla=All applications, hard to master Drupal=No comment
I use both Drupal and Wordpress.. IMHO, Drupal is by far the more powerful of the two. My site (Drupal) also has a premium access area which was pretty easy to setup.. I'm curious; can Wordpress have both "open" (free) areas of content and "premium" areas (only paid members can access) ? I dont know if that's what you had in mind, but if so, that is a question you might want answered..
If you want to set up a premium membership site, I surely think Drupal is your first choice. It is not only because Drupal Wins 2008 Overall Open Source CMS Award (hxxp://www.your-money-online.com/news-and-reviews/22-drupal-wins-2008-overall-open-source-cms-award.html), but also because of its most powerful community features.
I agree with a few, WordPress is the best, but it depends on what you want to do. Drupal can be confusing but it's easilly customisable, Joomla is just useless...
If you are looking for something more than blogging than its Drupal for you. Drupal is great CMS with plenty of options. You can set membership type, and access control very easily in drupal.
I suggest WordPress. I've used both joomla and WordPress and WP has much better SEO friendly plugins.
Paid membership on WP? I would stay away from that big time. What's the ecommerce solution? Is it open source, how is it supported, who scans for vulnerabilities, is the CC info stored, what happens if it get's hacked and all the CC is stolen... Sounds like a scary scenario to me. Drupal has a large support system behind their infrastructure, and the Ubercart module is partly run by a private company, so it's most likely much safer.
Oh btw you can transfer all your content, members, profile info etc over to Drupal very easily if you decide to do so.