Web CMS Review and Best Options

Probably you’ve heard of the term CMS or Content Management System before. But, let’s backup here for a second, and talk about it one more time for those who didn’t hear about it.

A CMS is acronym for Content Management System. Generally, a CMS is a set of modules and functions used to manage some kind of a work flow.

However, in the web industry, and that what we really care about anyway! A Web Content Management System or WCMS for short (I would refer to it with CMS most of times) has another definition. A WCMS is a software system normally installed on a server, providing website authoring, and other administrative tools used to provide high controllability on the website content without the need of any web programming languages or markup languages.

Can you guess now what is really cool about CMSs?

Yes! Newbies can use it to run their own websites without having prior experience in any web programming languages or markup languages at all!

So, now we have a good idea about that thing called CMS. Let’s talk about some of them and see what kind of options we got.

There are tons of CMSs out there, and they are all like “Hey! I’m the best. I can do this, this, and this.. etc.”

But, there are only few of them have the popularity and the reliability that made them the most used CMSs on the web. And they are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

Most popular CMSs. WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.

On the last CMS distribution calculated from the top million websites on the internet. WordPress was listed on the top place with about 63% of CMS enabled websites, Joomla got the second place with about 10%, and last but not least, Drupal made the third place with about 3%.

Let’s now talk about each one individually and see what we can get out of each option.

WordPress

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform on the web produced by Automattic. Web authors love WordPress because it made the publishing on web much easier than ever! WordPress mainly was a very powerful blogging platform. But, now, it evolved into a very powerful CMS that can do pretty much anything, not just blogging thing with thousands and thousands of widgets and plugins that extends the functionality of a WordPress based website. So, you can build with it a commercial website, a personal website or blog, e-commerce website, eventually you can do anything with it!

Joomla!

Joomla is an open source, very powerful CMS that is used by thousands of web authors to manage their websites. And the fact that Joomla is open source made it a CMS with one hell of a community! The developers community in Joomla is what makes it that powerful and awesome! Joomla also has one of the most enormous plugins and add-ons library ever that extends the functionality of a Joomla based website. You as a developer may use Joomla to do anything, you may make a living out of it, really!

Drupal

Drupal is more similar to Joomla, and the fight between them is on for years! Drupal is also an open source CMS powering millions of websites out there. Drupal has thousands of plugins and modules that extends its functionality as well.

Q: When to use each of them?

A: If you’re mainly developing a personal website or more like a blog, small company portfolio, etc. Then your best choice would be WordPress, it’s easy to install, manage, and customize to fit your needs. If you’re building a medium website, maybe for a company or something like that, then you definitely can use either of Joomla or Drupal. Eventually, it’s a matter of a personal preference.

So, now you know about what CMS means and what best options you have. What I recommend here you to do is that you go ahead and learn more about all three of those, at least be a professional in one CMS, and start using your killing skills in developing websites using it.

I’m hoping to see your kicking-ass work in the near future!

Have a nice day!

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