Today I spent 25 minutes installing four potential site management tools on my MacBook: WordPress Mu (v 2.8.4a), Omeka (v 1.1), Drupal (v 6.14) and Joomla (1.5.14). All were surprisingly straight-forward.
The notes I made for each were:
WordPress Mu:
Easy as pie, except needing to change from localhost on my Mac to zambonini.local
Omeka:
Tells me to hand-edit my database configuration file (I need to work out where it is). None of the other software tools asked me to do this by hand.
Need to download ImageMagick separately (Why can’t it use PHP GD library?)
Is the ImageMagick directory (that it asks for) the bin/ or the root one?
Asks me about things I don’t know about yet (image sizes, etc). Can I change these later? It doesn’t say whether I can or not.
Having said all that, fairly easy after that. Except ‘general settings’ within the admin panel is giving me an error/blank (need to investigate).
Drupal (6.14):
Quite a long installation, got a Fatal PHP Memory Error part-way through, not enough memory! (Though it did warn me about this earlier, to be fair. But still, none of the other packages threw a memory error)
Joomla (1.5.14):
Quite long process (like Drupal).
Usability of the install process leaves a lot to be desired (why is the ‘Next’ button at the top of each page?)
The ‘install sample data’ wasn’t clear (you had to press a button, rather than say ‘yes’ then ‘next’, which is what I would have expected).
Had to manually delete the Installation directory before continuing, which was a little worrying (i.e. did I delete the right one?). Drupal also told me to delete the install directory, but did’t FORCE me to. (I know, this is more secure, but worrying as a first-time user)
Yesterday I spent 25 minutes installing four potential site management tools on my MacBook: WordPress Mu (v 2.8.4a), Omeka (v 1.1), Drupal (v 6.14) and Joomla (1.5.14). All were surprisingly straight-forward.
The notes I made for each were:
WordPress Mu
- Easy as pie, except needing to change from localhost on my Mac to zambonini.local
Omeka
- Tells me to hand-edit my database configuration file (I need to work out where it is). None of the other software tools asked me to do this by hand.
- Need to download ImageMagick separately (Why can’t it use PHP GD library?)
- Is the ImageMagick directory (that it asks for) the bin/ or the root one?
- Asks me about things I don’t know about yet (image sizes, etc). Can I change these later? It doesn’t say whether I can or not.
- Having said all that, fairly easy after that. Except ‘general settings’ within the admin panel is giving me an error/blank (need to investigate).
Drupal (6.14)
- Quite a long installation, got a Fatal PHP Memory Error part-way through, not enough memory! (Though it did warn me about this earlier, to be fair. But still, none of the other packages threw a memory error)
Joomla (1.5.14)
- Quite long process (like Drupal).
- Usability of the install process leaves a lot to be desired (why is the ‘Next’ button at the top of each page?)
- The ‘install sample data’ wasn’t clear (you had to press a button, rather than say ‘yes’ then ‘next’, which is what I would have expected).
- Had to manually delete the Installation directory before continuing, which was a little worrying (i.e. did I delete the right one?). Drupal also told me to delete the install directory, but did’t FORCE me to. (I know, this is more secure, but worrying as a first-time user)
Screenshots of default administration screens after install:
Time spent installing software: 25 minutes
Money spent: £0.00
I recently went around this one for a client with a short timescale & limited IT support and ended up using vanilla WordPress. It got them going and it’s not too much of a jump onto Joomla/Mambo etc if they need to later and want to invest the resources.