The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

MX-System vs PostNuke

Okay, this may be slightly off-topic as it's not necessarily software development....
I'm helping a friend rebuilding a site with forum, news, the works. The current site runs on phpbb and lots of hand-built pages. We're thinking about using either MX-system or PostNuke. Does anyone here have experience with either or preferably both?
From reading some postings on the respective forums I get the idea that PostNuke has more modules to add in, but MX seems fresher and leaner.
Any opinions, remarks, hints, tips welcome....

Regards,

Duq

Duq
Wednesday, May 5, 2004

Postnuke is a bloated, horrid pig of a system. It tries to be all things to all people. It is harder than hell to work with. Even establishing a site style that diverges from the prepackaged styles is excruciating. If I had to choose words to describe life with Postnuke, I would say: agonizing; aggravating; extreme effort to do simple things; baroque administration and security system; very poorly documented (U must wade through a patchwork of FAQs and postings to postnuke.org public fora in order to find instructions, and nothing is really 'blessed' as the best single answer); slow/a CPU hog.

Postnuke is very feature rich. If you are OK with using all functionality out of the box as is, it will be easy to deal with. As soon as you want your own functionality and behavior, such as modifying the appearance of the index page, welcome to "heck".

Yes, Postnuke has many add on modules. The problem is that many such modules are not completely integrated or they have their own separate security system that you must maintain alongside Postnuke itself.

Avoid. I set up a web site for an organization in Postnuke. After dealing with it for a month, I migrated every page and function over to CityDesk. "Ahhh" what a relief.

Bored Bystander
Wednesday, May 5, 2004

If you are considering PostNuke, you might want to look at drupal http://drupal.org

It is similar in some ways, and a lot lighter. Plus, it has the best content categorisation I have seen in any CMS.

I have used it in production for a couple of sites, and I am very happy with it.

Tapiwa
Thursday, May 6, 2004