Blogging, PHP, Webmaster, Wordpress

What CMS Fits Your Website Needs?

2 Comments

This is a question I’ve been asking for a few years.

Recently, I’ve heard a lot about WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, but it’s practically impossible to find someone who knows all three and is unbiased enough to tell you the pros and cons of each.

Through Montana Programmers, I’ve been able to find a very unbiased Polson Website Developer who has been an excellent resource for asking all sorts of random questions. Although he knows more programming languages than I have fingers and toes, he hasn’t spent years of time testing out CMS’s. 😉

As you can tell, it’s pretty hard to find a unbiased website developer who knows a lot about many of the Content Management Systems, who could give me a good comparison of the Pro’s and Con’s of each. There are a few problems here:

  1. It is not a simple task to assimilate everything about a CMS structure. There is a lot to know about each, especially if you are going to develop add-ons or plug-ins for it.
  2. Once you have assimilated a CMS structure, it is even harder to branch out into other CMS’s. Website Developers program in what is most familiar with them because it’s the easiest and quickest road to take.

WordPress is not really a CMS; it is a blogging software which is so popular and easy to use that many people use it as a CMS. This blog is programmed in WordPress, and has been my “CMS of choice” for simple websites. I do realize that there are hundreds of other Open Source PHP Content Management Systems out there, and there’s a good chance that there’s a few of them which are excellent for larger, more complicated websites. I have a few website development projects coming down the pipe that I’d really love to use a more extensive CMS solution.

But before I can recommend a solution to a client as the “right one,” I really need to know enough about the best Content Management Solutions to be able to speak intelligently. Right now, most requests people ask for in a website can easily be “plugged in” to a WordPress istallation. But maybe another CMS will do it better?

Finally, a solution!

Open Source CMS Examples

Open Source CMS has over 200 Open Source PHP CMS demos installed and available for you to fiddle with and test out features. They also have Content Management Systems for many other languages as well. (Yes, each demo is reinstalled every so often.)

Check it out and see what CMS works for you.
Ashton Sanders

2 Comments

  • Hi Nicholas, Thanks for the comment.
    I’ve heard a lot of great things about Drupal, and it sounds much heavier than WordPress. It’s good to know you’re diving into it. I’ll definitely love to chat with you about what you can do with it.
    Ashton Sanders

  • Drupal has, as of version 6, become a major contender in the CMS space. Its learning curve is a bit steeper than WordPress’ but you get a ton of power and flexibility in return.

    I’m working on a few Drupal sites right now, and so far, I’m enjoying the process.

    My first such build is nearly complete

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