As a beginner, I'm going to build a good-looking video streaming website, but want the easiest way to build. I'm looking for a user-friendly CMS to create the main structure of my site. Please have a look at: http://www.threehosts.com/ratings/comparison-software/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html. As you can see they have provided a collection of websites created with WP, Drupal and Joomla. How can I understand if these websites are really built with the mentioned software? And how can I know if they have used any template for their sites or they have only used the mentioned CMS? Because some of these websites look really great and professional and due to I'm on a tight budget I don't want to pay for any template or theme.
I think BuiltWith will do this for you. Plug in the domain and it will tell you which technologies it is built on.
Most of the well-known video sites are custom jobs, but I'm sure WP could do what you want.
I suggest like everyone to use Wordpress, perfect for beginner ! You'll find several plugins to make a video streaming website (ex: https://wordpress.org/plugins/stream-video-player/)... You can use the tools they mentionned above to look for the CMS and plugins used. Tight budget + beginner = Wordpress by far ;)
Most sites these days use Wordpress & if you are on a tight budget, I would recommend using it as well. I've used with many projects and love its scalability and features. If you want themes, visit http://www.themeforest.com - great selection of professional templates.
Hope this helps!
For ease of use, go with WordPress.
You can tell if it's a WordPress website by looking at the source code. Look at the <head>, theme and plugin files will be there. 99% of WordPress websites will use /wp-content/. So you can simply search source code for that to see if it's WordPress.
If it is WordPress, you can find out what theme it's using by finding main stylesheet. Usually, path looks like this:
example.com/wp-content/themes/theme-name/style.css
In WordPress, theme information is included inside style.css. So when you look at that CSS file, you will know the name of theme, theme author, and sometimes URLs.
Hope that helps.
http://builtwith.com as John mentioned earlier is your first step, and as others mentioned if you are just beginning go with WordPress, about a third of all new sites now are on WordPress so you have the support, security and flexibility that goes with that.
If you're looking at a WordPress site you like the features of, you can dig a little deeper with http://www.wpthemedetector.com/ to see the theme they use and often the plugins they use. In my experience it only recognizes about 30% of the plugins out there, but often you'll get some great insights into how a site has been put together, and Viktor's tips above will help you find even more.
If you're comfortable with going through the page's source code (https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000746.htm), you can use the following telltale signs to determine the CMS currently in use:
1. Search for the "generator" meta tag, it contains exactly the information you need.
2. Search for CMS-specific directories, such as "wp-content" for WordPress or "templates" for Joomla.
3. Apart from checking the code, you can also try visiting specific URLs, e.g. try adding "/administrator/" to the homepage URL to see if it's Joomla or "/user/" to see if it's Drupal.
Please note, however, that any of those can be changed manually by the site admins, so there's no 100% precise method, to the best of my knowledge, unless you decide to simply ask the site admins :)
You can also install a Chrome extension such as the Wappalyzer which will tell you a page's underlying CMS automatically.
If you're on a budget, I strongly recommend using WordPress, as it has the steepest learning curve and offers a much wider template and plugin choice. You can determine which theme a particular website is using e.g. here: http://satoristudio.net/what-wordpress-theme/, the tool will give you a direct link to the (parent) theme's official web page - or let you know that the theme has been modified too far to be recognizable.
