What are options (hosted solutions, SAAS, internal) for supporting a membership-based site and adding community?
This was selected as Best Answer I agree that Joomla and Drupal are two of the better options. Drupal tends to be used more on the heavy-weight projects, while Joomla has a reputation for being easier to build and maintain. In the Joomla world “Community Builder” is the popular choice for building communities. It provides the site managers most everything needed to manage members, member information, paid registrations, and access to content based upon membership. The link below leads to a summary of this product. Recently I was a director in charge of a large, national membership. We used a professional membership system that incurred licensing running over $15K per year! We also used a dedicated server on Rackspace that ran about $800/month. That might have been needed a few years ago when we didn’t have the options we have today. Those expenses might be justified for a professional association that handles hundreds of thousands of dollars in membership dues. But I see such systems a
