Trying to choose a PHP open source CMS into which I will integrate an external app. I have pretty thorough experience with Drupal and WordPress, tend to prefer WordPress for its simplicity, though I haven’t worked with BuddyPress.
I’ve ruled out Drupal (too many features I don’t need, too complex, want to try something new) and thought I had it narrowed down to WP/BuddyPress, until I discovered Elgg just today. Did some Googling but found no satisfactory recent comparisons between the two (BuddyPress 1.2, Elgg 1.7) and very little info on Elgg in general.
Here are the feature requirements of the project I’m working on:
Multiple users: profiles, private messaging, discussion forums, commenting, facebook/SN integration and some way to create basic categories of users. That’s it.
The CMS must also be as easy as possible for me to integrate deeply to an external application. The external API is for an e-learning platform I’m building from scratch. Most of the activity here will occur in the browser via a JSON-based API. JavaScript will query the API in realtime and update the users dashboard and various features, etc. So I’m guessing it will mostly be template edits and maybe some admin modules if necessary. Users will register and login through the CMS site. The user data will be split between the CMS and the application, and obviously, I’d like to not duplicate any data between the two databases other than the User ID. Additional data related to courses, games, etc. will be stored in the external app, and there will be an admin for this, separate from the CMS.
Due to time constraints on the project, I need the CMS community/user features and don’t have time to reinvent all those wheels myself. I also desire to make the external app as robust as possible.
For these reasons I want a simple but flexible, LAMP-based CMS. Preferably well-designed so that I can continue installing updates w/o hacking the core.
Anyone with experience in both platforms – BuddyPress 1.2, Elgg 1.7 – care to share advice on which platform would be best, w/regards to my project’s requirements, I’m all ears! Thanks.
In the end I decided to go with BuddyPress, because it’s got more community traction and I’m already quite comfortable with writing WP plugins and themes. It looks like it should be quite easy to integrate the WP users database with my external one and bring them together in a JSON formatted API. BuddyPress does pretty much all I need it to out of the box and from my initial foray into it, the data field separation should come out pretty clean.
Not to say Elgg wouldn’t work either, I just haven’t read enough good things about it in the limited time I have to come to a decision between the two.
Still open to commentary from others!