Content Management Systems Overview

Not everyone has the time needed to put together a comprehensive website filled with visitor-luring content, or the coding skills necessary to bring anything more than a small personal site to fruition. Not everyone has the inclination to learn, or the budget required to pay a professional to do it for them. Even if you do prefer to roll your own code, maintaining all but the smallest of websites can be a drain on your time and energy. This is where Content Management Systems (CMSs) come into play. A CMS will help you to quickly and easily publish and manage content to the web, allowing you to build and maintain contentrich
and professional websites without having to write any code at all (unless you want to). There are many different CMS systems available; let’s take a look at some of the biggest, best and most popular.

Drupal
Drupal is an open-source CMS that has been around since 2001, an eon in web terms. It’s been updated and extended many times since then and is currently on version 6.14 so it’s very refi ned and is packed with
features. It’s an open-source CMS released under the GPL so it’s 100% free and is constantly improved and built upon by thousands of developers around the world. Drupal was picked as the winner of the Packt
2008 Open Source CMS Award.

Straight out of the box, Drupal allows us to create all manner of different web sites including blogs, corporate sites, community driven sites, forums, e-commerce stores and more. Drupal runs on many common systems including Apache and IIS so you’re not locked into a single platform. It is also database independent, running on either MySQL or PostgreSQL. You can even add other SQL servers by writing your own
backend if you prefer.

Another great feature is that it has its own version control system built in so you can easily analyze all changes made to the site to determine who made the changes and what the changes were, and can roll back to previous revisions if necessary. It also ships with a comprehensive user management facility which lets you defi ne different roles for groups of users, which is much easier than having to defi ne each user’s level of
access independently.

Overall, Drupal brings a lot to the table, it’s big and it’s powerful. But as with anything of this scope it can be a little complex too. It’s great for hardcore development, but new or inexperienced users may struggle with it at first.

Joomla
In terms of sheer numbers, Joomla comes out on top as the most popular CMS available; more people trust Joomla with their content than any other CMS. Joomla provides a broad range of out-of-the-box functionality and is highly extensible. Highly extensible may be an understatement; there are currently over 3,500 usercreated extensions that add a wide range of functionality to your site including everything from access-control and contentrestriction extensions to video players and galleries.

It’s been around for slightly longer than Drupal although it used to be part of a CMS called Mambo and it didn’t split away into today’s Joomla until 2005. It is currently on version 1.5.14 so it’s also quite a mature and stable solution. It can be used to create a wide range of different types of website including large corporate portals or intranets, e-commerce and business oriented stores or community based sites.

Like Drupal, it’s big and powerful, but it may involve a steep learning curve for new users and any clients that you hand it over to may have diffi culty with it. It can also be tricky to use a completely customized theme
and some see it as too much of a one-sizefi ts-all package. For big projects that you continue to manage yourself, however, you could do worse than join the masses and go with Joomla.

Magento
Magento differs from Drupal and Joomla in that it is targeted specifically at the e-commerce market. It’s only been around since early 2007 and is, therefore, a relative new-comer to the CMS fi eld but Magento based
stores have already handled over $25 billion dollars in transactions and are used by over 33,000 merchants world-wide.

It also differs in the fact that to use the full Magento package you need to purchase a commercial license; these don’t come cheap and the least you can expect to pay is in the region of £5,500 ($8,900) per year.
There is a free ‘community’ version as well, although this offers much less functionality out of the box than the licensed one. This CMS is really for the serious professional that seeks a return on investment.

However, the enterprise edition does come with e-commerce-specifi c features not seen in the core packages of other CMSs, including out of the box support for things like gift-certifi cates, private sales events and a rich merchandizing suite. It also ships with a BridgeConnect module that allowsit to connect with common accounting and enterprise resource planning applications. You also get SLA agreed technical support.

Like Drupal and Joomla, there are a wide range of extensions that can be used to attach additional functionality to your store; like the core Magento package itself, these come in both free and paid for variants.

Modx
Modx is a popular CMS choice for freelance developers because it makes it easy and quick to create new sites and easy to hand over to clients who can manage the resulting sites themselves. Modx is billed as being AJAX and SEO friendly meaning that you can add cool Web 2.0 features with ease and maintain  searchengine friendly URLs from the outset. The project was started in 2004 and version 1.0.1 has just been released in October of this year.

This CMS makes it easy to create websites compliant in the latest HTML and CSS web standards and also provides strong JavaScript support without forcing you to use a particular JavaScript library. It promotes semantic and clean code, for example, the drop-down menus that you can add to sites effortlessly are built
from simple list elements and links – something every purist web-developer will appreciate.

Modx is geared towards small to medium sites that require easy and quick setup and easy maintenance, but that’s not to say that it can’t be used for other types of site when necessary.

Summary
There are many more CMSs out there than we’ve been able to look at in this article, so if none of these look appealing, there is sure to be something out there for you (and remember that different CMSs will be
particularly suitable for different projects so even if you choose one today, that may change under different circumstances). There is no ‘best’ CMS available, only what’s best for a single project.

Article originally published in iGB Affiliate Issue 18 and written by Dan Wellman a freelance writer and IT professional that lives and works in a thriving city on the south coast of England. He insists that he has other interests besides computers, and vows one day to prove this somehow.