Someone new in the domain of website development will be amazed to find the diversity of CMS or content management systems available out there. Some have become practically household names because of the extensive range of functions they perform, while a few others are relatively obscure and still trying to gain a foothold in the online web applications space. Depending upon the site one is building and the functions they need for the site, one can zero in upon the CMS to be used. It is not too difficult to find a perfectly suited CMS from the wide range, if one has fair idea of the huge line up of open source CMS available and their functions. Below are some of the most popular CMSs out there.
Joomla – It is one of the most popular CMSs, used by many big names for their websites. Although most CMS need to customize to integrate with the front end of the website, Joomla is also suited for back-end networks. Besides being used for building normal websites, it is also put to use by companies for different things such as for inventory control systems to reservation systems, to complex business directories. There is a long development history behind this popular and widely active user-base CMS. Hence, getting information on its use is not difficult as there are many documents available on them. One of the biggest strengths of Joomla is that it comes with tons of add-ons and plugins. Extending the functionality of this CMS does not require a user to get into the hassle of performing any custom coding. However, lack of diverse and high-quality themes as compared to other CMSs and its less user-friendly back-end are some of its drawbacks.
Drupal – Another popular name in the CMS section used by several top-notch companies is this free PHP-based Drupal. The wide active-user community and the presence of extensive features to enable building of internal as well as external sites make it a highly used content management system. There are tons of tools in it to help website developers organize their content. The community-generated documentation is being updated and hence users can get information about any new feature or functionality being added to this particular CMS. Whether you need to know about designing themes, modules or anything related to installation, you can get it all in the documentation available with Drupal. The robust community support, including the face-to-face events and presence IRC channels and 6,000 add-ons are its big plus points. However, a user may have to face a complicated theming system and bear with lack of high quality, free commercial themes when using this CMS.
Magento – Resort to this ecommerce script, an open source CMS that is fast gaining prominence among website developers for its rich features. Online merchants can control the content, its look, design as well as functionality of their e-commerce sites with this powerful CMS that makes use of MySQL and Zend PHP databases. It provides for greater search engine optimization, effective marketing and empower site makers to create or edit sites as per their unique business needs. Aided with highly intuitive administrative interface, Magento makes space for innovativeness to be done by the online merchant and also facilitates scalability and agility, thereby offering increased return on investment and higher growth.
Besides the above CMSs, there are many others such as TextPattern, Contao, ExpressionEngine OpenCart, Zencart and others. Analyze the different features of different CMSs and find out the best one that suits your needs. Enhance customer service, power up search engine efforts and ease your order management and manage content with the perfect choice of CMS.
