The pro’s guide to getting the best CMS system
June 8th, 2008 Posted in Interesting stuff, Magazines.net magazine on CMS systems
I’ve just been looking through the latest edition of my favourite magazine of the moment .net and I was enticed this month by a front page feature entitled Choose the best free CMS.
I’ve already covered E107 and Mambo in this blog, but one of the points made in this feature is that blogs can be regarded as content management systems as well.
The link above is a cut down of the feature, and if choosing a CMS system is currently what’s preoccupying you, it’s well worth digging out the full article in the July 2008 edition.
CMS in a nutshell
I’ve given .net a good plug now, so hopefully they won’t mind too much if I tell you more about the article.
The key point of the feature is: do I need an ‘in-house’ or purchased CMS system, or are the free ones perfectly adequate?
The article splits CMS into three categories:
- Blogging tools (aimed at single editors/small groups of editors)
- Tumblelogs (used for sharing links/photos/comments but nothing sustained)
- Content frameworks (Most flexible systems for web professionals)
Tools of the trade
From these basic categories, the CMS systems are listed as follows:
Blogging tools - defined by scripting language
Wordpress > PHP
ExpressionEngine > PHP
Joomla! > PHP
Movable Type > Perl
DotNetNuke > .NET framework
Typo > Rails framework
Radiant > Rails framework
Mephisto > Rails framework
Tumblelog-based systems (unknown territory for me!)
Content Management Frameworks
Niche CMS solutions
And the winner is?
The article dowsn’t come up will an all-out winner, but makes some very useful points about selecting the right CMS for your needs:
- Make sure you choose a CMS system that will grow with your site
- Do you want to host the site yourself? If not, Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad are the best options.
- In house systems can be a bad move, as they’re often put-together by just a few people. Free/Open source systems are collaborative and grow in response to the needs and requirements of users.
Finally, there’s a great forum connected with .net which is really useful for web developers.
Give it a try at forum.netmag.co.uk
