Top 5 Content Management Systems
Many businesses & individuals are embracing the idea of setting up company blogs and websites to share relevant content with their target audience, but also using a CMS on the back end of their entire website. A Content Management System (CMS) makes it easy to update your website on your own terms, without knowledge of web design and the code behind it.
There are dozens of Content Management Systems out there and depending on the purpose of your website, there are more than a handful to choose from. Which, of course, leads to an age-old question: what is the best CMS? Here are the top 5 to help you answer that question:
Although it has its roots as one of the pioneer blogging platforms, WordPress has evolved over the past few years to become a powerful Content Management System that is being utilized even by non-blogging websites. The multitude of plugins and widgets, thousands of beautiful, well-priced themes and multi-page brochures has made it a favorite among a majority of website developers. And unlike many other platforms, WordPress has a very active community of users surrounding it making it quite easy for one to find the relevant tutorials/information about any aspect of development.
Here are some of the notable strengths of WP.
- A huge and resourceful developer community with plenty of tutorials and documentation available for free.
- A rich variety of both paid and free themes, customized plugins, and widgets. With a little effort and concentration, this has made it possible to develop almost any kind of site using only WordPress and mostly-free plugins.
- Utilizes a user-friendly dashboard making it quite easy to manage content.
Unfortunately WordPress can often be overkill for many small projects and complicated to use if you just want a basic site without having to spend hours searching for the right theme and plugins. Apart from the user forums, there is little to no official support because it is a free open-source project.
Just like WordPress, Joomla has quite an active developer community and it mostly optimized for developing back-end networks. For this reason, Joomla! unlike WP can be used across a large section of systems ranging from reservation, inventory control, complex business directories to normal static informational websites.
Here are some of it’s strengths:
- Has more than 7000 extensions.
- The existence of a supportive and active user community that has tons of tutorials, documentations, and relevant guides.
- It features an open design platform & source infrastructure written completely in PHP
However, the back-end of this platform is not as user-friendly and easy to use as other CMSs so inexperienced users may have trouble. Joomla is also not suitable for when you want to build a very basic static site, and is usually reserved for more complex backend websites.
It is yet another CMS used by high profile sites firms and organizations such as Sony Music, MIT, Popular Science, The New York Observer, etc. Besides having a very active community, it has a dozen IRC forums, channels, and real Drupal interaction sessions. Instead of regular themes and plugins, Drupal itself employs more than 6500 add-ons to extend the functionality of the platform.
Advantages:
- Has a relatively robust community and documentation support that blends both face-to-face meetups and other IRC channels.
- The 6500 add-on makes Drupal a highly extensible CMS platform
- There is a large number of companies that specialize in offering commercial assistance and support for Drupal users
There is however, a noticeable shortage of high-quality themes compared to CMSs such as WordPress. The platform’s theming system is also a bit complicated for the average user.
Craft is more or less like WordPress only that instead of the out-of-the-box features in WP, Craft brings advanced custom fields instead. So if you are a developer looking to build a custom site from scratch starting with just but a few basic building blocks, the Craft CMS is the way to go.
Craft CMS boasts of an excellent commercial support network and it has little to no restrictions whatsoever on how you can develop your site – a developers paradise with a great community.
Craft is not suitable for bloggers who are only getting started and it doesn’t have an interactive demo for one to try out before they purchase because it only provides the backend architecture.
Squarespace closely resembles WP with one of the main differences being that it is not open source and cannot be installed on your own hosting account. For these reasons, Squarespace is locked down to the features created by them. This results in overall less flexibility and less options.
The main reason someone would consider going this route include:
- SquareSpace’s tools are all fully integrable into their custom website builder. You don’t have to come up with your own and there is only a small learning curve.
- SquareSpace has a very responsive support team because the software/hosting is a paid service. They will not help directly with website design, but they support all of the tools and web-based software.
Overall Squarespace is less powerful than the alternatives and has relatively fewer ready-made plugins that can be used to enhance your site’s functionality. It can be great for a basic portfolio or business “brochure” website.
Choosing the right CMS is one of the most substantial decisions you make before beginning your website development process. Be sure to take the take to review the documentation, available plugins, themes, and options before getting started. Leave a comment letting us know which CMS you usually choose!
