[Discuss] Small website, non-technical users: Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress?

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

On 1/7/2014 12:24 PM, Daniel Barrett wrote:
> On January 6, 2014, Bill Horne wrote:
>> ...we've been using MediaWiki for the board's website
>> (http://www.big-8.org/) until now, but we have to move the site to a new
>> server which doesn't offer it.
>> So, the question is "What's the best compromise between ease-of-use,
>> learning curve, and maintainability if we have to choose between Joomla,
>> Drupal, or WordPress"?
> Have you considered not switching platforms? I would think the cost of
> moving all your mediawiki content to a new platform and retraining all
> your users would far exceed the price of a managed VPS on
> www.linode.com or www.hostdime.com, where you can install mediawiki
> yourself and keep doing what you're doing.
>
> You didn't say how many users you have, but I run mediawiki on a cheap
> shared VM at www.hostdime.com (about $5/month) just fine.
>
Thanks for the suggestion: it's always important to ask "why change?", but that question was answered by my ISP's terms of service: the site has been stable for a while, but right now, it's sharing the 12GB of space on my virtual machine at prgmr.com, and I need to lighten up the disk load, so I'm jumping at the chance to find it a new home.

The new site has 300 GB of space and unlimited bandwidth, so it's a keeper on that basis alone: it's already paid for, which is a big plus in a volunteer organization, and has professional support available should something happen which I or the other members can't fix.
Alas, it offers the three options I mentioned, but /not/ Mediawiki.

There are several utilities available to convert Mediawiki format to WordPress, so that's a possibility, or (although it would mean a lot of work) the board could set up a fixed HTML site and forego a CMS altogether.

Bill

--
Bill Horne
William Warren Consulting
339-364-8487