I have a project on my plate that involves creating a site. This site would be a Customer portal. It needs to have a separate portal based on the URL it is accessed from. Each different portal needs to have the same template with potential different add ons for the different portals. I was wondering which different CMS systems people here recommend for this, and why. Right now I have been looking at Drupal. This would be living on AWS and needs to be scale well as things grow. Open source is ideal, but not a must. I appreciate the recommendations and advice.
Scale as in allows many concurrent users? I think you should consider how much custom code you will write when you consider a CMS. If you end up writing a lot of custom code, the CMS will probably get in your way.
I’ve worked with Drupal a bit and it is very well thought however I imagine you’d be better off with a custom application from what I understand your requirements are. If you do pick Drupal, definitely spend some time playing with content types at the very least. You can try drupal for free at https://pantheon.io/
I do not think too much custom code will be needed. Just existing plugins and possibly a few custom ones. I know that what this will be replacing is wordpress based, and while not ideal it is working at the current scale, but there is only one portal currently not multiple different ones based on URL.
I don’t know about your different-portal-per-url requirement, nor am I a web dev, but here is some info I found for myself when looking for a CMS:
Grav: Flat file based, no db, so easy to set up / migrate / backup. Good for small to medium (10k pages?) sites. Good active development and community. Useful tools (media handling etc) to make development easier. Interesting and optional portal/admin page.
BoltCMS and OctoberCMS: db-based, less active communities than Grav, but still interesting. Some prefer Bolt’s structure and logic. OctoberCMS has a nice instant preview content editor.
Textpattern: Has a steeper learning curve, but apparently well liked by pros. Extremely customizable.
The above are PHP based. For a modern approach with JS:
Ghost: Javascript based (Node.js). Well-liked as a blog-focused CMS, with the goal of “doing WP right.” Might be limiting for those who don’t want a blog, or those who don’t want to or can’t install the dependencies, i.e. Node, on say shared hosting.
All CMS say “easy” to use, develop with… but it depends on whether you’re familiar with the underlying technologies like PHP, twig, etc. I’m certainly not, so they all have a learning curve that I found steep at least for someone just wanting to put up basic sites.