In addition to my own blogs and websites, I host and maintain a few websites for friends, family, or organizations that I belong to. I’m thinking about switching some of those websites from conventional hand-coded sites to CMS.

I’ve played with test installations of both Joomla and Drupal on my own server. I found Joomla slightly easier to wrap my mind around. Joomla has a wider variety of free and paid themes available; Drupal is more secure. The sites I want to switch are quite simple so both Joomla and Drupal seem like overkill. They may be a good choice for the sites that belong to organizations since it would be easy to integrate a members-only area, discussion forum, or other interactive features down the road.

My first self-hosted blog used Movable Type and of course you know my current blog uses WordPress. In the past, I never really considered using blogging software as a base for a website, but some of the WordPress frameworks have made me think I should reconsider. Tonight I took a little time to read up on StudioPress’s Genesis theme framework and Crowd Favorite’s Carrington framework. My brain hurts. I’ll let you soon know what I end up doing!

(NaBloPoMo | August ’10: 6 of 31)