: Best CMS for review-type sites Is there an ideal CMS for making a review site? By review site, I mean like a restaurant review site where you have each entry belonging to different major categories
Is there an ideal CMS for making a review site? By review site, I mean like a restaurant review site where you have each entry belonging to different major categories like Cuisine and City. Then users can browse and filter by each or by combination (Chinese Food in Los Angeles, with suggestions of other Chinese restaurants in LA, etc). Furthermore, I'd want it to support other fields like price, parking, kid-friendliness, etc. And to have users be able to filter by those criteria.
I've been told that with a combination of custom taxonomies, plug-ins and many clever little queries, that Wordpress 3.x can handle this. But I'm having a heck of a time with it getting into the nitty gritty, and that's where I find the community support is lacking. The sort of stuff you'd think would work in WP, like making one parent category for Cuisine and one for City, don't really work once you get further in and start trying to pull it all together. Then you find these blog posts where people say, "This example shows that one could create a huge movie review site using custom taxonomies..." but when you go and try it you hit all sorts of challenges and oddities that point a big long finger at Wordpress being in fact a blogging platform. The best I came up with was one category for the cuisine and one tag for the city, then I created a couple of custom tag-like taxonomies for the other features. It's quite a mess to try to figure out how to assemble all of that into a natural, intuitive site. I expect a few versions down the road WP will be able to do these sorts of sites out of the box.
So I thought I'd take a step back before I run back into the Wordpress fray and find out if maybe there is another platform better suited to this sort of relational content site. Directory scripts in some ways offer many of the features I'm looking for, but I need something more flexible and, hopefully, interactive (comments, reviews). I'm especially looking for feedback from people who've crafted sites like this. Thanks!
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I'll highly recommend having a look at Crowd Vox which is by far most feature-rich and flexible review script. Its being used across 100+ websites.
Disclosure:
I'm one of the founder of Crowd Vox.
When WordPress started it was a blogging platform. Now it has evolved into a more complete CMS. More and more website owners are using WordPress for purposes other than simply blogging, and premium themes are being used in many of these cases.
With the affordability of great premium themes, WordPress seems like it will continue to grow even more popular among these types of sites. I believe that this growth will increase the need for more complex plugins.
My advice would be to use WordPress with a custom post type. It will allow you to create any kind of entry you want with any meta data you need. There are a few plug-ins to help with creating them.
I strongly suggest that you look at Drupal. It has a very steep learning curve, but it is 110% worth it in the end.
There are many directory scripts out there, although many are made by PHP script-kiddies and not great quality. Hot Scripts will have a good selection I'm sure.
There is a "professional" extension for Joomla called Mosets Tree, which I have used and is pretty good. It can take a little effort to customize it, if you want to change the layout a lot, but the default set up looks fine in most cases.
Incidentally, as I asked on SO, you don't have to pay for it since it is an open source license. If you can find it anywhere (it's quite prevalent on torrent sites), then it's perfectly legal to install and use.
There may be similar plugins for Wordpress and Drupal too, so shop around.
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