How To Choose The Best CMS For Your Website
CMS development needs a lot of things to be kept in mind starting from the user-friendly interface to good search capabilities. Needless to say, different CMS offers different features and here are the top 6 content management systems compared to help developers choose the best one that will suit their needs.
WordPress
WordPress is a free and PHP-based CMS which can be used to make both websites and blogs. Though WordPress started out as a blogging platform and is widely known for it, over the years it has proved itself to be a worthy CMS. The developed plugins on the site have modernized its usage with the open source script made available, making WordPress a great choice for CMS. WordPress comes with themes, widgets, and plugins along with a built-in capability of creating blog networks and multi-blog installations. It will be easier for a developer to compare WordPress with other CMS if he or she knows the strength and weaknesses of it, which are as follows:
Pros:
The strengths of this CMS are:
Being one of the most popular platforms available, it has a huge developer community along with ready available tutorials and guides for help.
It offers both free and paid plugins that facilitate the creation of almost any type of sites.
Managing content with WordPress is easier thanks to the user-friendly dashboard offered by them.
Cons:
Despite being the most popular of them all, WordPress has a few weaknesses as well, though they can be easily ignored:
Basic sites do not need the many features offered by WordPress.
A site might face a lot of security issues if additional security measures are not taken to protect it.
Developers using it may not get an official response in case of any query.
Joomla!
It is another free and PHP based CMS which is often used by notable companies. It is suitable for back-end networks and can be used for almost everything from inventory controls to complex business directories and at the same works fine for a normal website.
Pros:
Apart from the common pros of any popular CMC like having a wide developers’ community, easy tutorials availability and lack of mandatory requirement of customary coding thanks to varied plugins, Joomla! also, has a few other strengths:
OpenID, LDAP, Google and many other can be used for user authentication.
It has more than 7,000 extensions.
Cons:
Even this popular site has a few cons that should be kept in mind:
The backend of Joomla! is not as user-friendly
It does not offer many high-quality themes.
Can be overbearing for simpler sites.
Drupal
This free and PHP based CMS is highly popular and much like Joomla! It is used by many high profile companies as well, like Sony Music, MIT, and New York Observer. It provides a developer with facilities for building both internal and external sites while providing many tools for organizing the content of the sites. Drupal has a wide user community, face to face Drupal events, IRC channels and forums to help clarify its users.
Pros:
This popular CMS, needless to say, has more strengths than weaknesses which are as follows:
Extraordinary community support is available for its users.
Drupal is highly extendable thanks to the 6,000 plus modules available.
Many companies offer commercial support for it.
Cons:
The Weaknesses are as follows:
Simple sites are better off without this CMS.
The themes are of high quality but limited in number.
The theming system is more complicated than other CMSs
Expressionengine
This is a PHP Based CMS with charges vary according to the license. It is a commercial yet open sourced software with its base code built in CodeIgniter and has a team of developer providing technical support.
Pros:
The strengths of this CMS are:
It does not have a history of any major security breach.
It puts no restriction on how a site can be designed.
It provides it’s users with a proper commercial support.
Cons:
The weaknesses are as follows
Simple and smaller sites do not require this.
It can prove to be very costly especially in case of commercial sites.
No demo is available before the purchase
Textpattern
Textpattern is a highly flexible CMS that is free and PHP based. It is both easy to use and design by the developers and is very friendly to non-technical users as well since it can convert plain text to XHTML texts. It is well suited for all sites and sizes and comes with a full online manual. However, the weaknesses of this CMC include that it lacks a huge variety of themes, templates, and plugins and has a smaller community of users.
Contao
This CMS was formerly known as Typolight and is free and PHP based. Its user interface incorporates Ajax and Web 2.0 features while providing advanced editing and recording features for the contents. The numerous modules available in it acts as a major strength while the cons are a lack of availability of themes, especially the free ones and a sluggish back-end support which makes it more appropriate for smaller sites.
Conclusion:
Since the best CMS is very subjective and depends on the developer, the best six available in today’s world is provided here. Compare them and choose according to your needs.
Based on these details, you can well compare the CMS and choose the one that best suits your purpose.
