For quite some time, we have been looking for a robust Content Management System which would allow some of our clients to have rapid access to update their sites. This is especially important to political candidates as the campaign season heats up. We have been experimenting with a few solutions, both .NET and PHP-based and have settled on Joomla! as the winner.

Several factors were involved in the decision making process including ease of installation of the supporting framework and CMS system, learning curve for the Castagna.net support personnel, rapid deployment of new sites, and the learing curve of the client. Oh, yeah...cost was a significant factor as well.

We picked one for each platform that we felt best addressed our requirements after looking at several packages for both. The packages we decided to investigate deeply were Umbraco for the .NET candidate and Joomla! for the PHP candidate. Both of these packages have a significant feature set and both are open-source which adequately address our cost requirement.

Once we had completed our investigation, Joomla! was the clear winner!

Installation - the first challenge in any software evaluation. I'll be the first to admit it, I don't like confusing installations. Having worked in a retail software company where we had dedicated developers creating our InstallShield packages, I know this can be quite challenging at times. Regardless of the complexity of the package being installed, there is a happy medium for the user experience.

Umbraco, for a .NET application, has one of the most confusing installation processes I've encountered in quite a while. Umbraco has, to their credit, done a good job of presenting an installation guide on their site complete with screenshots, it's just really, really long. To give you an idea how long it took to install and configure Umbraco, our team was able to install Apache, PHP, mySQL AND the Joomla! files in a shorter period of time than getting to the point where we were installing the Umbraco files.

Joomla!, however, was pleasantly surprising for the install. Unzip the downloaded files to the Apache DocumentPath and you've installed Joomla!. Wow. To install another Joomla! site - repeat the first process. Each site runs and is administered out of its own folder and using VirtualName servers in Apache multiple Joomla! sites can be hosted on a single IP address. We didn't get the chance to even attempt to run multiple Umbraco sites, so we can't comment on how it's done in Umbraco.

Support learning curve - Administration for both packages is straight-forward and well presented. We liked the interface on both packages and really couldn't agree on a clear winner in this category so we're going to cheap out and call it a tie.

Rapid deployment of new sites - as discussed in the installation topic, Joomla! was incredibly easy to set up multiple sites. Simply unzip the Joomla! distribution into a new folder in the Apache DocumentPath and you've got a brand-new site. Umbraco did not present this feature in a way that was clear to anyone involved in the testing. Speculation says that the installation process needs to be repeated for each instance of Umbraco desired, which means dealing with file permissions, verifying ApplicationPool settings, among others. Granted, you don't need to install IIS, AJAX or SQL2005 for a new Umbraco instance, but it's definitely not as simple as unzipping files to a directory and making an entry in the httpd.conf file.

Our winner in this category: Joomla! and it wasn't even close.

At this point, we leave our heads-up battle between Umbraco and Joomla! declaring Joomla! the winner. The clients who volunteered to be guinea pigs...er...beta testers have been giving us favorable feedback on Joomla!. Our staff did the templates for the clients but have left all other tasks up to the client. There seems to be some confusion surrounding adding new modules, but once the modules are added, the new features are understood quickly by both our support team and the clients.

We will continue to investigate the features of Joomla! for the next few weeks before offering sites built in Joomla!. We want to make sure that we can assist our clients in the best way possible with this new offering we're adding to the line-up.