Hi All,

I am making a website where people can login to there account and post there unique art or specialized arts and they will maintain it also like updating similar to wikipedia. There I want to sell few books also regarding different arts. So my question is which FREE software i shall choose for my website which will fulfill my above needs.

Thanks
-Ricky
artofmaking.com

Which free software do you have available?

I recommend something like Joomla. the learning curve is simple and can have wiki, customer management, shopping cart integration and extensions galore. It sounds like a site where if the number of community members grow, you will be looking to add functionality and make user management easier. Joomla is good for that...and FREE :) I can point you to some good extensions if you need help choosing those, but the user reviews on Joomlas website are pretty accurate (when the extensions are popular)

I recommend something like Joomla. the learning curve is simple

I challenge this outright. I like Joomla very much and have created many sites with it but the learning curve is rather steep for the novice and integrating and maintaining the various extensions can be quite tedious and serious SEO remains an unresolved issue with Joomla.

I was also looking at joomla but reviews says user management is not that good. means i can not assign a user some more privilege or restrict the same. like if some user is contributing lots of posts to a particular section like lets assume "art of making love" then i can not make him the section manager so that if some other user also want to contribute to the same section then the manager can monitor his section and clean some..

U know it makes my side management lot easier.

-Ricky
artofmaking.com

any other software like joomla

As I asked before: which options do you have available? Do you have a shared account? Need to set up all of your own? Are you in a planning phase?

I have a test account for shared hosting which i have bought for testing. I want to know is there any more good software there??? then please let me now.

Joomla i have been testing. I want to test any other software then i will choose which one i shall go for.

Here's a list of some free software programs that come with a hosting account:

http://valueapplications.com/Home.aspx?prog_id=448292

Have you look on the Drupal its another open source alternatives for joomla.

Check on your hosting account panel to see if you have a free script installer. These are included in Fantastico Pro free script installer, Instalatron, and Elefante free script installer. Go to the sites and try out the demos to see which one suites you the best.
PORTALS/CMS

Drupal is an advanced open-source content management tool for creating dynamic websites, which provides a broad range of features and services such as: user administration, publishing workflow, discussion capabilities, news aggregation, metadata functionalities using controlled vocabularies and XML publishing for content sharing purposes.
Geeklog is an open-source content management tool, which offers a broad range of modules.
Joomla! is a powerful Open Source CMS used for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications.
Mambo is a high-level portal and content management system, which offers inline WYSIWYG content editors, news feeds, syndicated news, banners, mailing users, links manager, statistics, content archiving, date-based content, 20 languages, modules and components.
PHP-Nuke is a very popular community-based portal with a large choice of modules and languages. It features multiple capabilities such as web administration, polls/surveys with comments, statistics, user customizable boxes, a banner system, backend/headlines generation, a search engine, file manager, download manager, FAQ manager, etc.
phpWCMS is an Open Source web content management system, which works on any standard webserver platform that supports PHP/MySQL and gives users the flexibility to separate layout and content.
phpWebSite is a feature-rich content management system, which offers announcements, menu management, document management, link management, photo albums, block makers, FAQ, a web pages maker, polls, an information categorizer, a calendar, a form generator, etc.
Post-Nuke is a flexible and secure portal and content management system. It offers a large selection of modules and blocks.
Siteframe is a content management system with which a group of users can share stories and photographs, send email, and participate in group activities.
Typo3 is a free, feature rich, content management system built with PHP and running under UNIX and Windows.
Xoops

I personally recommend Joomla!. Check out Joomla.org for more details. Good Luck!!

Hello,

I was basically looking for a software which allows a visitor to register a free account in my site and post contents on my site which he can manage and edit but cant delete. So is WordPress is good for it or Joomla or anyother.

Regards,
Ricky
ArtOfMaking.com

You can consider either Joomla or Wordpress. Both are solid open source softwares with lots of powerful plug-ins. For Joomla, you can play around with the Virtuemart and community builder modules.

Hello,

I was basically looking for a software which allows a visitor to register a free account in my site and post contents on my site which he can manage and edit but cant delete. So is WordPress is good for it or Joomla or anyother.

Regards,
Ricky
ArtOfMaking.com

With Joomla users can register themselves, whereas afaik Wordpress doesn't allow this feature, you need to create users with specific priviliges; but maybe there is a plugin for that. Some forum might also do the trick.

I feel you would make better headway by using WordPress - additionally, it is easier to learn WordPress and to manage plugins on it, comapred to Joomla - but that's my personal preference.