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John Wragg > Content Management Systems (CMS)

Content Management System (CMS) Reviews

How to use CMS systems to provide community support

 

Background

These pages contain discussion on the use of Content Management Systems (CMS), and reviews of the main open source products using Apache, php and MySQL.

Content Management Systems (CMSs) are based on a database holding the content, and theme templates for display. These do a lot of work for you and provide a solid platform with a professional look and feel.

You Might Benefit from a CMS if...

  1. You want to be able to create and edit content yourself?
  2. There will be multiple authors?
  3. You need to register users?
  4. You need a photo gallery, sound or video?
  5. You need an interactive site, with blog-like articles and comments?
  6. You need a discussion forum?
  7. You need to support, categorise and sort a lot of content?

Or you just want a development platform that will avoid re-inventing the wheel and reduce development time and cost.

Now Three Main Contenders

The main Open Source CMS contenders now are Joomla and Drupal. There are hundreds of others but few with a critical mass of users and independent developers.

Plus there is WordPress, which started out as blogging software but has evolved to be a low end CMS contender.

Joomla

Joomla is a mid range CMS system that grew out of Mambo, following a crisis of control in 2005.

The Joomla CMS has a separate administrative backend, which is fine for site admin but a little tortuous for content creation and editing.

First you need to create the content, then attach it to an appropriate menu. Content can be categorised but only in a two level hierarchy of Sections containing Categories. This is OK for many websites, but is not as flexible as Drupal.

Most of what you need for a simple site is there in the standard distribution, and can be extended from the thousands of contributed modules and themes.

Joomla CMS is good for a small or medium sized website, for which it provides a professional framework and a wide variety of optional plug in functions.

Websites by John Wragg based on Joomla include:

Drupal

Drupal is described as more of a Content Management Framework than a CMS. It is an application for building almost any type of website, including user driven Web 2.0 sites.

Drupal's Categories can be dynamically selected according to multiple criteria, for display to specified users or groups. This layered approach is very flexible, very abstract, and very powerful.

However the Drupal CMS Core is very minimalistic. It is hardly usable for even a simple website without various contributed modules, of which there are thousands. This gives a steep learning curve.

The saving grace from a usability point of view is the Edit tab. This shows automatically on any content page that you have the privileges to edit, much easier for the non-technical than with Joomla.

Drupal is good for complex, dynamic and user driven websites, and can have inherently excellent search engine optimisation.

Demo websites by John Wragg using Drupal:

WordPress

WordPress started off as a blogging system, and is still available as a commercial blogging service from wordpress.com. However you can download the software and run it on your own server (or ISP hosting service) for free from wordpress.org.

With your own hosted version you can add static Pages, including a Home Page, About etc, and turn off the blogging features if you don't need them.

This can give a nice 5 to 12 page website, such as Johns Support Blog, with easy to use update by the site owner and the availability of lots of extensions and themes.

John Wragg's websites based on WordPress

My Experience

My first experience was with phpNuke, and then PostNuke, for the Quakernet sites from 2002. Both were very buggy, which led to various spin offs including Mambo.

In 2004 I used Mambo for www.qbl2004.org (since withdrawn), very usable despite the inflexible menu structure with its "Sections" and "Categories".

I used Drupal 4.7 in October 2006 for FindhornLight.Con, (since discontinued), because of the strong community and the collaborative Book environment. Since then the Menu and Category problems have been sorted out.

More recently in 2008 www.NextGEN.cc and www.rainbowheartservices were both developed using Joomla, and there are other Joomla projects under development.

Since then I have gone back to Drupal, for Art Therapy UK and other sites still under development. Once it is all set up it just flows.

CMS Review Sites

There are now two sites with in depth reviews of short listed CMSs, plus CMS Review which is a bit over the top:

  1. live-cms.com
  2. immertech.com
  3. penAdvantage.org
  4. CMS Review

Next Page

Introduction to CMS Systems, requirements and positioning of Content Management Systems

Related Pages

  1. Introduction
  2. Open Source CMS
  3. Low End Commercial
  4. Corporate
  5. Recommendations
  6. CMS Resources
  7. Website Services

Reviews

  1. live-cms.com
  2. immertech.com
  3. penAdvantage.org
  4. CMS Review


 

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