Joomla

[Liberty]

Just an update:
Thanks to every one who gave me advice and offered to help me. I decided to go with Wordpress, I first tried to get it up and running on my home server. I couldn't get it to run at all. after a while I just gave up and went for the pushbutton install available on the site I have my old blogger blog at. The intall went great and voila I have a new blog. I still have a lot of work to do on on it like customizing the mast head. getting a links and blog roll going, and setting up access to 7 years of of blogging. but I'm pretty happy with Wordpress,

Thanks again,
http://www.libertysblog.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[baldeagle]

I am the volunteer sysadmin for The Stovebolt Page, a website for antique Chevy and GM trucks and the people who love them. The owners have been asking me to install a CMS for a while now. After extensive reading, I decided to install Joomla. (The servers run FreeBSD.) I recently read an article that rated the top three as follows (summarized):

• Wordpress - easy to use, difficult to customize
• Joomla - fairly easy to use, easier to customize than Wordpress
• Drupal - the developers' CMS - very easy to customize but not so easy to use and more complicated to learn

Since the owners have been using Dreamweaver and developing their site for about 15 years, I felt they could use Joomla without too much difficulty. They are self-taught, but I have introduced them to style sheets and server side includes as well as the concept of reusing code on many pages.

I think your choice of Wordpress is the right one. It's difficult enough learning Unix without having to add on all the details of a CMS plus PHP plus MySQL.

Some advice. MySQL installs by default with two root accounts with no password and two other accounts with no password. Remove all the accounts except the root@localhost account, and then set a very good password for that account. Configure MySQL to only listen on localhost. This will make it more difficult to break in to the database (although security holes in Wordpress can nullify that advantage.) When you setup any database, you should create an account and a password unique to that database and only grant it sufficient privileges to do whatever the application needs to do.

Make sure you keep everything updated regularly. You can use YUM for that.

If you have questions or need help, don't be afraid to ask me. I have over 10 years experience as a security professional and am very experienced with all OSes (but I prefer Unix - particularly FreeBSD.) I'm much more adept at commandline stuff than GUI interfaces, so I don't know a great deal about phpmyadmin or similar apps that many people use for management. If you setup phpmyadmin, use .htacess to limit access to the page and require a password before you can even view it. Phpmyadmin gets attacked constantly by automated scripts, as does Wordpress.

[OldCannon]

Take a look at Drupal as well

If you think you might ever expand beyond basic use, you are going to find yourself in a nasty box with Joomla. It does "simple" pretty nicely though. I"m a big proponent of Drupal myself, but I don't recommend it for basic needs. It scales very nicely though, and it's a "real" CMS -- works well for shopping sites, forums, multiple blogs, etc. Places like PopularScience.com, FastCompany.com, and TheOnion.com (I love that site) use Drupal.