Hi guys, I will be starting my own music review website soon and was wondering if some of you with experience of the various free CMSs could tell me which would be best for this purpose? Basically I want the design to be as flexible as possible, and to be able to display lists of recent reviews, news etc. on different parts of the page. Layout-wise it will probably look a little something like the following sites: http://www.pitchfork.com http://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk Once the site gains some popularity, I also want to be able to integrate a database of registered users who can post comments on articles and use the same account in a message board. I must emphasise that this needs to be free - my limited knowledge of this stuff tells me that is possible, but I don't know where to start looking! Thanks in advance guys.
Joomla or Drupal must be a good option for you. But Joomla has a wide range of free modules/plugins that will help to fulfill your needs without any cost.
Thankyou very much for your reply Shavic. I have heard a lot about Joomla, but is it easy to integrate into your own page design? Or would I have to follow one of Joomla's own templates? I've also heard a lot of good things about Wordpress, and noticed that a lot of very big websites (CNN, Yahoo and others) use it for their website. Would it be easy enough to integrate that into my own page? I would really appreciate any advice anyone can give me.
Looks like a bit of customised WordPress job. Have a look in ThemeForest and find one that looks similar, then contact the author to see if they can increase the customisation to make it do the extra things you need.
Pretty much any cms could handle this - e107, drupal, joomla etc etc - basically this kind of site is exactly what a cms is best at