Choosing a CMS
June 4, 2009 by Spencer Spellman · 11 Comments
If you went to your Twitter or Facebook page right now and typed in the question: What is the best CMS; odds are high that you’ll get 10 different answers.
Depending on what type of content management system you want, Wikipedia provides an extensive list. But, what is the best CMS?
To answer this, we’re going to look at three of the major ones (Joomla, Drupal and WordPress).
Let’s start with the most familiar of the three names, WordPress. You probably realize its capabilities as a blog, but do you realize its potential as a CMS? WordPress is great for the novice to content management systems. Set up a magazine or e-commerce site easily with WordPress, by taking advantage of the many different themes and plugins available. Once you get the right theme and plugins, it can be fairly simple to turn WordPress into a multi-functional CMS, where you can give access to multiple users.
For users that are a little more advanced Joomla offers a bit of everything. It’s geared more toward designers, developers and administrators, as it’s not as user-friendly as WordPress. A new user may have to spend more time reading documentation and learning about it before jumping into it. However, new users can take the demo for a spin to see how they like it before fully jumping in.
Finally there’s Drupal. Drupal is geared more for developers, and much less for designers and novice users. It’s also the CMS used most often for “community sites” that require more social networking features. Although it may take more time and resources to create a website, it can pay off as there are many top-notch Drupal websites on the web. Drupal has a strong community of developers that can help answer questions and troubleshoot as well.
So what’s the verdict? Drupal, Joomla or WordPress? This question all depends on your wants and needs and may vary from situation to situation. If you’re a beginner, then first take a spin with WordPress and work on conquering it.
If you have a firm grasp on WordPress, but are looking for more bells and whistles, then look more at Drupal and Joomla. Both require more knowledge and expertise, and may require more time, but often pay orr with solid sites that can do a lot. If you’re a developer, you’ll probably want to use Drupal, because you have much more freedom and room to do what you want to create excellent sites.
So what’s your verdict? Have you tried all three? Is there one that just soars above the others?
Those are nice – and I’ve used all of them – but I prefer MODx. The reason is simple. I write all of the xHTML and CSS and the only features that get installed are the ones needed for the jobs. Plus, clients prefer the ease of use of the MODx manager.
This is great…if you are looking for a really dynamic site that needs all the extra “features” outlined here. All of these are overkill for most designers that just want to give there small business clients editing, page creation, and image maintenance. We created PageLime (http://www.pagelime.com) to give designer the ability to do great creative work, and not have to force it into a template, a system that was supposed to run blogs, or spend 60 hours developing there own. We’re not right for everyone, and everything has it’s place, but if what i described sounds like your needs. Please give us a try! Thanks!
-Tom Twitter: @pagelime
P.S. We also spent a lot of time on the UI. We know how important impressing clients is.
@Thomas McLeod
How are you forced into a template with any opensource CMS? You know as well as anyone else that will read this article that theming for any of the major opensource CMS’ in this article is not a difficult task if you know PHP, XHTML and CSS…
We use WordPress for our site and are very happy with it. Custom coding within the WP framework can be a little tedious, but overall it’s a great CMS.
@Nick
‘Not Difficult’ is an extremely relative term. Maybe not difficult for you. Sure was difficult for me. How do you design a website? Everyone i know uses some kind of image program…like Photoshop or maybe even Illustrator. They base it on some kind of grid (960,etc). Then you chop it up to the web. Using HTML, and CSS.
For many, many, many sites that’s all you need to do. Why on earth would you install a CMS (or a blog system like WordPress) just to make the home page and the about page of a 7 page website editable? Why would that site need to pull content from a database? Why would that site need a fully custom CSS? What if you had designed a really unique layout that didn’t fit into the a standard 3 or 4 column grid.
When I say ‘Not Difficult’ i mean 5 minutes. That’s how long PageLime integration takes, if that. We are not the choice if you want to run a very content heavy dynamic site that changes every 5 minutes.
If you are a construction company that wants to keep your rates up to date, or a clothing boutique that wants to post new specials and update images of your inventory, or a 13 year old thinking about starting up a babysitting company and just wants to be able to change a list of current dates of availability so her perspective clients hire her. Why would these businesses need Drupal, WordPress, or Joomla? Why should they have to learn to code or use Dreamweaver?
If you are a web developer who wants to give your clients who do similar professions to the latter examples…a simple interface that handles all there needs, that works right out of the box, that you never have to upgrade because it’s a service and upgrades across all sites at once, and basically simplifies content management down to the level of Microsoft Word. You should check out PageLime.
I have no problem with the CMS’s mentioned in the article. I do have a problem with opensource CMS zealots who act like they are the only solution to the problem. That for some reason you need to have every feature possible on sites that don’t need that many. It’s not about features, its not about Opensource, it’s about the benefits to your clients and picking the correct tools for the correct jobs. Sometimes these are right, but sometimes they are not. The internet needs to stop acting like these big 3 are the be all end all of content management just because some people have spent years getting used to integrating. If your grocery store was across the street, you wouldn’t get in your car and drive there, sometimes it’s faster to just walk. That’s why we created PageLime.
I began deal with CMS software with Nuke. Thankfully, that didn’t last long. Unfortunetly, I went from Nuke to Post Nuke before finding the one I stuck with for years, Xoops (also a fork of Nuke according to Wikipedia). I think a good CMS is one that makes it easy to manage your content with. That’s the whole purpose of one in the first place, so I always look for something that is simple in the admin area. We’re developing one that has that at heart. I’ve never been a fan of over complex administration areas that give you the power to do everything other than find what you want to do.
Also, if I can’t understand and figure out how to design a theme for a CMS in an hour, I don’t bother with it. Making your product easy is how you gain and retain customers.
PageLime seems to be the same concept as CushyCMS; editable regions of a static page defined through CSS classes. If you’re looking for something like that, you might also want to look at Mech Edit (http://mechedit.com/), which is the same concept except it’s free and you host it yourself. Might be the best option. I myself would be concerned with something like PageLime or CushyCMS because what happens if either of these go out of business? Sure, the files on your server are still your’s, but then you have to figure out how to make them easily editable to your clients (i.e. new training, more work!).
I started with phpNuke, then moved to Joomla and then started to build my own based on Codeigniter php framework. Now I’m fun of WP. But if you want to use it as a CMS then there is too much work.
modX +1
The case for a cms is simple. With literally billions of websites out there, the chase for having the edge is on, and cms’s hands you the advantage of attaining the edge cost effectively. Example:
Customer wants a website. He also wants to be found easily on Google, and didn’t realise it but it would be nice to communicate with his customers in the form of a newsletter. It would also be nice if more of his customers would express their requests via email which is faster than by phone.
I build him something in wordpress with a small blog and plug in mailpress and cforms.
He writes a bi-weekly news article, and drives his present customers to his site. He retains these customers because through his newsletters, they understand his company and its products better. With the extra articles he gets indexed better and receives more queries from would be customers. People also realise the nice form on his site, and start to use it for queries.
The higher costs of the development is offset through 1. Customer retention, 2. Higher sales, 3. better productivity.
This solution works no matter how small the company, and how basic its services.
As to which cms to use, personal choice and functionality I suppose.
As an enterprise level developer, I have used many CMS’ over the last decade, and certainly all of these are good options, and the comments are definitely relevant, but I think a lot of people overlook the long term scope of the site. No matter how well you think you have “now” figured out, the “future” is something that scope rarely addresses.
I have found that there are limitations to all of these, I prefer Drupal for ease of themeing and control, but I also found that WordPress and Joomla have nice advantages, especially in usability. But, if you don’t know where your going, then you will run into pitfalls with all of these. Joomla is not really a great community based CMS (social networking) and I find that WordPress is limited in how far you can get it to work without serious modification.
I hate to say this, but if you are not a programmer, why would you develop on any of these? No matter how “easy” things seem to a computer science major, if you barely know HTML, etc – you have no business developing on a professional level.
All of these are really made for professional developers, because they are developed by professionals. I personally believe that the most important step to identifying a CMS is that you find someone who is an expert, so you can gain valuable consultation on how to use and maintain your site.
A CMS is not a magic pill, there is still a huge learning curve, even for site admins and power user, point is – any CMS is a good solution if it addresses the scope of your business now and into the future.