Been running Drupal for a while for a Social Community and have also been using IP Board "Community" edition for a family site. I'm currently in the process of creating another family site for the "other" side of the family. I've been sniffing around for another CMS for this task.

Now IP Board was fine to start with, liked it but their current path of requiring ioncube I don't like, too much of a headache for "paid" software ya know ;)

Drupal as fit my needs for the numerous modules, performance and excellent SEO. But I'm not a coder, I know enough about coding to run away screaming ;) Actually I'm OK at hacking existing code/scripts but just really suck at writing my own code. Anyway since the family site will be private SEO is not a priority for this site.

Anyway creating an account here gives me a base of the user interface, looks pretty decent but here's what I need to know. Since "family" will be using the site and the geek factor for most is rather low so I need an idea of -

1. Formating aids
a. Posting I noticed there wasn't any "helpers" for BB code or "filtered html", is there a module for this?

2. How's the performance in comparison to Drupal, Joomla. Now don't wanna get into any flames please but if anyone has experience with other CMS's just a good honest general "opinion" would be great.

3. Permissions, how granular? I'm looking for things like the basics of separate groups for delegating rights for full html, filtered html, bbcode, blogging, forum, and others like hidden forums/pages etc.

Thanks

Hi Marcuso,
I'm still learning the in and outs of Silver Stripe (mainly the coding side of things). For the past few weeks that I've been playing with it I have to say it's the best thing I've come across as far as open source CMS's go.

-Usability is fantastic from the admin backend. Really intuitive especially in comparison to Joomla. I've only found limited formatting options for text, but enough for all the basics. No colour or point size selection for text, but if you get a good template some of the defined CSS styles should appear as options in the WYSIWYG editor, which if you're into your coding gives you limitless (bond only by web limitations) for styles and formatting. Setting up a page and adding media is really really basic, no copy and pasting of urls, just upload in the content and Silverstirpe handles the saving and storing.

-With the mentioned above fantastic usability required geek factor is at a minimum. I've been setting up Silverstipe for an old country/farming writer, by old I mean 50-60 and very limited web knowledge. He's loving it, after going over the admin side of things over the phone with him he's able to manage all his content with in an hour of playing around with it.

-SEO is also wicked. Joomla is ok for SEO but by default URL rewriting is a bit of a mish, Silverstripe already has it set up out of the box. Metadata is clearly visible, you still required to fill it in (there are some Joomla components that generate meta descriptions and title tags for you). And again if you have a good template you can have an entirely CSS based site only using table where necessary; Even Joomla 1.5 spits out tables to wrap modules and content articles.

-It took me a bit of digging to understand user permisions in Silverstripe but its all there. Full control for limited visablity dependant on usergroups.

I hope that helps. And in saying all that Joomla is still awesome, its a really powerful CMS but you need to spend a lot of time with it before you can use it to it's fullest. Can't say much about Drupal, only had a little play.