I'm feeling conflicted as to which CMS to choose in this instance. Summary of site: main domain is a public arena. It's for an industry specific subscription based newsletter. Visitors to the site are able to see information about the newsletter, and there are freebies on the site (free downloadable resources) as well as some free articles. I already have this part of the site built. What I need is a way to make the rest of the site members-only/subscribers-only. Preferably the members area will be secure. I want to put the CMS on a subdomain, since I've already got the public access areas built and would rather leave them intact and have something like members.mysite.com for the CMS/member's area. Inside of the member's area there will be a private forum, tools/resources, and an archive of past newsletters. I need to configure it to where only paying subscribers can register for the member's only area. Preferably, I would like to give them instant access once they've paid for their subscription, and hopefully be able to make their accounts expire if they haven't renewed after their annual subscription is up. On the site I've already set up, I've chosen to use Paypal for order fulfillment. This is all confusing for me, since once this is all set up I want to to be as automated as possible but don't have much experience with CMS. Also, somewhat an unrelated question I think I'll throw in in case somebody could point me in the right direction, I also need a way to deliver the newsletters to their email (html or .pdf format - I haven't decided yet) every month. With my own research, I think something like GetResponse or Aweber would be appropriate - is this correct? I need to take them from mysite.com -> Paypal to buy -> Instant access to newsletter + member's only website. This is all making my head spin, I've messed around a little bit with Joomla (doing basic things, nothing like what I need to do here) and I've installed Drupal before (but not worked with it) but otherwise this is all new to me. So which is most: 1) Beginner friendly? 2) Capable of handling things like automation? I've read time and time again that Drupal can do everything, but it's got more of a learning curve than Joomla. 3) Fits the most/all of my needs? Hopefully with no or little programming, preferably using modules. Okay I think this is it. Thanks in advance!
Hi briggszilla I can't comment about Joomla but I am doing something very similar for a Drupal based membership site. I'm using base Drupal and the following add-on modules: 1) http://drupal.org/project/simplenews - The simplenews module to allow visitors and members to subscribe to regular site newsletters. The newsletters are generated automatically and emailed to subscribers each month. 2) http://drupal.org/project/lm_paypal - The lm_paypal module enables members to purchase subscriptions to premium content using paypal. 3) http://drupal.org/project/userplus - The userplus module enables you to broadcast emails to registered users. I don't use an autoresponder as Drupal handles all of the email traffic. PM me if you would like more details. HTH Petey
I am very happy with joomla now. Back before 1.5 it was kinda hard fitting Joomla to your needs. Now i use Joomla as my top 1 Web Development Framework, i have solved almost every problem we had, plus developing own plugins, components and mods is really easy from a 1.5 point of view. I do have to admit there is a whole bunch of obstacles you need to get past but once at that point Joomla is very powerful. Compared to Drupal (i use drupal for my private sites mostly) Joomla is more user friendly, but grants you very little freedom until you have understood the api it delivers. From the point you get into the api it is as powerful as drupal. Still drupal is compared to Joomla your weapon of choice if you want to have absolute freedom and a from the ground on up framework, plus you have to learn very little api conventions, tho Joomla i would pick to build websites with little effort and if i had the time to get into using Joomla as a framework. thanks