Off the shelf portal suggestions

[Joff]

Does anyone know of any portal software for running a reviews website? Preferably ASP.NET.

[Brian Turner]

Most portals have some nasty SEO flaws that need reigning in - but even still, for internet publishing IMO you need to move to PHP/MySQL as part of a general LAMP set-up. There is just so much SEO knowledge and coding directed towards that set up.

2c.

[Joff]

I can normally replicate anything PHP into ASP/ASP.NET though but I'm after a project to get my .NET teeth into so I wanted to kill two birds with one stone

Any review-based portals for LAMP then?

[Brian Turner]

Well, Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress - none is ideal in themselves - Joomla by all accounts can be very fiddly and the URL structure can be less than ideal, Wordpress tends to be limited to content publishing rather than community integration, and Drupal has ll the bells but again can take a lot of effort to get them set up.

My personal favourite is Wordpress on simplicity and flexibility, but I am tempted to explore Drupal a little more.

[tamecrow]

Brian - I'd definitely recommend exploring Drupal. There's an automatic installer script on the servers I use, so I click two buttons and I've got a full install of Drupal with all the bells and whistles. Let me know if you want me to set up a throwaway domain on the server for you to have a proper play without the faff of setting it all up.

[Joff]

I'm steering more towards Drupal, think I'll try both that and DotNetNuke to see how quickly I can get something of use up and running

[Brian Turner]

I still have some reservations about Drupal, but recently I've noticed that lots of my sites are running on Wordpress + vbulletin combos, which is less ideal than a single CMS incorporating publishing + forums, which I believe Drupal can do.

I daren't even begin to think of the headaches involved in migrating WP and vb into a single Drupal install, though...

[Joff]

I personally wouldn't move away from Wordpress as a blogging platform unless Drupal was particularly amazing and wouldn't consider moving existing sites over unless there was a foolproof migration plan.

Having an integrated site of news portal, forum, blog, etc would be great for future projects though..!

[Brian Turner]

I can usually integrate news, blogs, articles etc into a single Wordpress CMS - I don't do that here at Platinax simply because the rewrite rules interfere with the directory - but certainly I use it on other sites fine.

The sticking point is building a community - at present I push people into vbulletin which is running separate, and while there is a Wordpress-vbulletin bridge, I daren't use it because of the amount of coding involved when pushed against the number of sites I have in this set up.

Besides, I have some excellent anti-spam filters for vbulletin - when I used to edit at Threadwatch, built on Drupal, it had appalling spam problems.