Webpage Development

Well, I haven't started working on any of the Linux projects I blogged about last time. Right now I'm trying to help my friend Greg set up a web site for the science museum he works for. I haven't really designed a full web site before, so it's a bit of a learning experience. The main requirements are:

• Easy to maintain
• Provide a discussion forum
• Allow registered users to blog

I've looked into a few different Content Management Systems. I found a few really helpful sites for this process:

• CMS Matrix - which provides comparisons of various CMS solution in (you guessed it) a matrix
• Blog Software Breakdown - another comparison matrix, but more blog software oriented
• Wikipedia - what can't you find here?
• Open Source CMS - these guys let you demo all sorts of CMS software

At the moment I'm leaning towards Joomla. It's PHP based and runs on top of MySQL and Apache. I have installed it under Kubuntu on my laptop. It has a lot of plugin modules for blogs, forums and such. Maybe I'll install it to manage my main bluevalhalla.com webpage. I know it has a bridge to Gallery2, my photo gallery (which is also PHP based), but I'm not sure what I'll do about blogging since I use Blogger at the moment.

I tried to install Drupal, but for some reason the automated installation through Kubuntu failed. I didn't bother tracking down the problem, I like the Joomla administration interface better. I guess we'll see how it goes...