Yes, @jakrose you’re right, WP requires the right theme and plugins to make it an adequate CMS for us. That’s something this project could provide. Question is – with those adjustments to the base install, how could it be packaged so that ordinary users can install it? What about maintenance?

I agree largely with Schwanksta on EE. I use it and am a fan. Great flexibility, would be much easier to mold to whatever we want. Yet being less of an end-user product, it’ll take more work. But we get to do it. More molding, less hacking?

Daniel – EE opens much of its code and allows anyone to develop extensions, which can be released freely under any license. So no, we can’t give ExpressionEngine away for free, but anything we build for it can be GPL or whatever.

For our current purposes, I think building from scratch with Django or anything else is a bad plan. For speed’s sake, as existing products get us halfway there to start. But also for those pre-existing communities to help now and support of the core software long-term.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say we should run to use Blogger, but we don’t have to fulfill every ideal today. We just need something that works. Not in 2010. Now.

Papers could even use Blogger with a ported Wordpress theme, so it’s time.

Also, I’d love to see the backend of something built with Django. We should get a hookup.

However, the gist of it was that you don’t need a Geek on staff if you’re going with a lot of the popular CMS options. WordPress and ExpressionEngine both have a ton of firms and people ready to design your site the way you need it. EE has a professionals network, whereas with WP you just need to Google a bit.

Yes, WP is easier for the non-tech to use, but it’s also limiting in that way. A lot of stuff you might want to do would require either finding a pre-built plugin, or hacking PHP directly. The latter is not a fun option for the non-tech crowd.

I also think that WP is harder to build a solid news site with. Even the Hurricane’s site looks more like a blog, with all of the posts being in chronological order. However, you can use custom fields in WP, meaning that you could weight posts according to their importance.

In EE, accomplishing that is much easier.

@David I don’t think you can compare WP and Django. WP is a blog-centric CMS, Django is a framework that lets you create database-driven Web apps of all types rapidly. There are no templates to help you out, and you’re stuck either hacking Django’s admin interface to include WYSIWYG and whatever else you want, or rolling your own.

I love Django, but writing a CMS in Django is a lot different than taking a CMS and customizing it to your needs. You also have the benefit of an entire community using the same CMS as you, and most likely running into the same sorts of issues.