

Ask HN: What is the best CMS for a content+app (50-50) type site? - srik1234

A search on CMS yeields thousands of results. What is the most popular (&amp; good) CMS these days? specifically a CMS that supports mobile devices and works well with a website that includes lots of content &amp; apps.
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patio11
YMMV, but the best solution I've found for this is either:

1) If your CMS just needs to be used in-house, then roll your own. It takes a
week or less, you can deep-integrate it into your applications, and you'll be
guaranteed to get more or less exactly what you want.

2) If you either need it to be exposed to external/non-technical people or you
absolutely do not want to spend time developing CMS features, use WordPress
for content pages and your app stack of choice for app pages. You can have
them share the same domain if a requirement for e.g. SEO by using reverse
proxy tricks -- trivial to Google if you know the words "reverse proxy." If
not a requirement, don't do it that way.

One of the nice parts about using WordPress is if you have a high-
generalizability problem like "It needs to work on an iPhone" then you are
basically guaranteed that some 17 year old designer has hacked together a
plugin which makes it mostly work on your iPhone. The downside of using
WordPress is that... feel free to rephrase the last sentence.

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dgunn
I've actually wondered about this a bit before. You're kind of the "Marketing
Engineer" around here so I'll ask you.

Do you do what you described in option 1 or 2? I know you use WP for your blog
but what do you do for the marketing/landing pages of your apps? Do the
marketing pages live in the same code base as the app? I'm inclined to do it
this way personally so that integration of something like ABingo! is easier.

~~~
patio11
Bingo Card Creator is 95% #1, Appointment Reminder is #2. Client sites depend
on what I can convince them to work with, largely tending to follow whomever
"owns" the marketing site internally (engineers prefer #1, non-technical folks
prefer #2).

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grumps
There's a lot of factors here. Use the right tool for the right job.

If you want to put in the for to doing some learning Drupal is a good. Its got
a massive community. Its not as "plugin" friendly as WordPress and its more
server side Dev friendly than WordPress. For my personal use I use Mezzanine
which is a Django project. I picked it because its got a lot of solid basics
that id need, is python based yet has the backing of Django community.

Unless you roll your own you're always going to become frustrated with a
decision that someone else has made for yourself.

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olympus
I'll go ahead and suggest the obvious: Wordpress.

It has one of the largest ecosystems (if not the largest), and you can usually
find multiple plugins to do whatever you want. You can self host, use their
free hosting, or pay for their premium hosting. It has a variety of responsive
themes (both free and paid), and a mobile switcher that will auto-detect if
you are surfing from a mobile or desktop device. Due to its popularity there's
tons of tutorials and help on bunches of forums. It may not be the best if you
are looking for a particular feature set, but it is probably the best all-
around solution.

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eknuth
I do a lot of django, so I wanted mezzanine to work out. Unfortunately, it's a
challenege.

Wordpress is wordpress. You're stuck with php and mysql. (ick).

Jekyll is awesome and together with [http://prose.io](http://prose.io), it's
basically a cms.

[http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/07/27/build-cms-free-
we...](http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/07/27/build-cms-free-websites/)

~~~
grumps
Out of curiosity what was the issue for mezzanine?

Small anti WordPress rant... it uses absolute URLs for everything which is a
total PIA when moving domains.

~~~
dgunn
I've used mezzanine before but ultimately removed it from the code. If you're
interested in adding a company blog to your app's domain, it just touches too
many things and makes a mess. I use zinnia now [http://django-blog-
zinnia.com/](http://django-blog-zinnia.com/).

I think mezzanine is a great alternative to wordpress. It makes a great blog
if that's all you want. If what you need is a CMS to handle the content side
of your app, you may want something a little more flexible/light weight.

~~~
grumps
RE: Part I get it... It's kind of just like Wordpress, great for blogs and
everything else is difficult IMO. The only difference being you can still use
Django if you need to. I guess... I don't know enough, just enough to be
dangerous. :-)

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leev
Drupal would be a natural choice for this.

1)It handles thousands and thousands of users out of the box and saves you
masses of time with prototyping, and

2) has over 20,000 plugins (that you can get in and tweak) free for the using
or modifying.

3) It's got a security team that is constantly vigilant that sends out
security updates for you. (That was one of the big sellers for me.)

4) It's got a bit of a learning curve, but it's truly the swiss army knife of
CMS's.

5) Once you've built something in Drupal, your app may seem slow, but then you
can performance tune it (and its server) to be very very fast.

6) There's a huge community (the other huge selling point) that is very
helpful.

7) There are plenty of nice responsive themes that you can tweak for any
device you want.

8) It's very gratifying for developers to create new functionality that's
never been built before.

9) It has a very well documented API.

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amac
I use Drupal. As others have mentioned, these have their downsides but on the
upside, it's got a decent developer community and integrates well with the app
itself. (usehuman.com)

