As forum admin, somewhat heavy user and oldtimer, I'll try to answer some of your questions. I am not a coder, however, but I'll redirect the more technical ones to the appropriate person.
First, I don't know how much you have read in the forums on this site about the history of Coranto. To make it short, the community (and the script) was dying, and this new site is a rescue operation just started but well underway. We plan to launch both a new site design and a new stable release (1.25) within the next few days. The previous version 1.24 has been in use on thousands of live sites for more than a year now, and is considered very stable - version 1.25 does not contain any major changes.
As the script is very stable and we are in real need of coders, we won't be doing any major development of the core at the moment. Instead we will be focusing on improving the promotion part (telling people about Coranto), support (helping them use it here) and pre-built distros (see answers beneath).
The main idea behind Coranto is that it doesn't provide you with a site design - instead it allows you to insert just about any content you can imagine in any place you want. This makes it extremely easy to create output in various formats (RSS / HTML / PHP) etc., but also requires the person setting it up to know the HTML and CSS necessary. We are working on making templates for blogs, small newspapers etc., though.
1. Coranto's flexibility makes it usable for any site from small blogs to large sites with millions of hits a day. Each newsitem can be put on a static page reducing server load, but Coranto's flat file database approach is known to become a problem once news database reaches sizes of 50-100 megabytes. Support for MySQL exists, but is unfortunately not compatible with the newest versions - a problem that is being looked into.
2. I am going to be rather offensive and present you with a tremendously long list of pros, assembled by user Abbeyvet earlier this week:
GENERAL:
- Free and Open-source
- Easy to Install
- Well documented, active community for help and support
- Stable and tested on thousands of live sites
- Modular structure - core script plus addons
- Complete separation of style and content
- 'Hooks' to allow easy development of custom addons
- Automated backups
- Highly portable - easy to move to a new server
- No database required, but support for use of MySql
- Manage multiple sites from a single installation
- Small footprint on server
- Easy and highly configurable archiving, by date, age or number of items.
- Can be integrated into an existing site
CONTENT MANAGEMENT:
- Multiple Categories
- Fine control of appearance using both styles and templates
- Can generate content in any format (HTML, PHP, RSS, etc)
- Totally customisable submission pages (per user, per category, whatever is required)
- Unlimited custom fields can be created to define content
- Profiles control which content, in which order and in what format will appear on published pages
- Content can be extracted and displayed based on any field
- Multiple options for publishing content (using profiles)
--- articles split over multiple pages
--- multiple articles per page
--- merge headlines/articles from multiple categories
--- content split by date, alphabet or any custom criteria
--- many more options
- Integrated File and image upload
- Supports integration of any WYSIWYG editor
- Can open editor from published pages to quickly to edit content ('Edit this page')
- Store content for future publication
- Schedule publication at a future date
- Expire content by date, by number of items
- Profiles can select content by age, by date, by number of related items etc
- Sort published content by age, alphabetically, numerically etc
- Stats on content
- Easy search facility for finding submitted content - search by any field
- Preview content prior to publishing
USER & WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT:
- Supports multiple users with different access levels
- Administrator: Complete access to all functions
- Editor: Can add posts and edit/approve content submitted by standard users
- User: Can add content, either for immediate publication or pending editorial approval (customisable)
- Access can be controlled and refined per category, per submit page or even per form field
- Customisable context-sensitive help
- Messaging system, Admin notices
- Staging of content can be configured into system
- Easy roll back to previous dates
DESIGNER / DEVELOPER FEATURES:
- Style/Template syetem gives very fine control of page appearance
- Templates can be created in designer-friendly programmes such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, then added to Coranto
- CSS friendly - templates can be fully CSS contolled
- Multiple templates - as many or few as you like
- Templating is very flexible with total control over on-page code - building valid pages is easy
- Easily build customised menus which change as pages are added or removed
- Menus can be completely styled with CSS
- Pages, including Menus, can use conditionals to include or exclude content based on defined parameters
- Link validation for both internal and external links
- Build in conditionals system can control how or if content displayed
- Perl code can be used directly in styles to customise or pre-process pages before publishing
- Easy to set up a sandbox to test new features before making them live
- Content can be generated in XML format
- Can generate the same content in multiple formats - eg HTMP/PHP, Printer Friendly, RSS, Plain text etc
SEO BENEFITS:
- Page titles, descriptions and keywords and other meta tags totally customisable on a per page, per category or any other basis
- Search Engine Friendly URLs - can build flat files with no variables or parameters in URL
- URL stucture can be entirely controlled - eg it is easy to have URLs like
www.example.com/widgets/red-widgets/this-widget.php
- Simple on-the-fly content changes - including changing meta tags
Now for the cons - the biggest one is the fact that Coranto is difficult to master compared to other CMS's who gets you "up and going in 5 minutes". You have to design the site yourself, and you have to grasp the concept of profiles and styles, which is how Coranto works. Oh uh... I really can't think of any more. Perhaps somebody will fill me in.
3. Installing Coranto is easy - just like installing any other scripts it's all about uploading in ASCII mode, chmodding the files right etc. The footprint on the server is also relatively small (Around 300kb) Once Coranto is installed, posting content is as easy as filling in fields and selecting the right category; anybody can do it. Uploading images or other attachments to your content is easy - and there's also an addon allowing the site manager to fill in custom explanations for each text field.
4. One of our coders will have to answer this one.
5. (Silly voice:) There is NO question 5!
6. No templates. But this is work in progress - we plan to package Coranto full-featured with finished templates for a blog, a photo gallery, a newspaper etc.
7. Yes. There are huge amounts. The basic Coranto install is really simple, practically all the benefits in the large list above comes from the use of an addon. To mention a few: Search facility with Google-style templated output, allowing users to comment on content, uploading of attachments to content items, guest posting with admin approval, 2.0 RSS feed builder, creation of static pages for all newsitems, scheduled backup of data and settings... To see all of them go
this page (scroll down past all the "Addons by ..." items, this page is work in progress!)
7. I wouldn't know, I never used Joomla for anything at all.