A great article from Six Revisions, summarised below.
Content Management Systems (CMS) have evolved into more than just publishing content, but managing your workflow as well. CMS’s nowadays allow you to easily conceive, edit, index, and publish content, while giving designers and developers more flexibility in customising their look and functionality.
Below are a few of the best for you to take a look at:
ExpressionEngine (EE) is a flexible CMS for any scope of project. Within a few minutes, you’ll understand how to easily begin creating content. EE’s templating system lets you quickly see instant changes live. EE also has a multi-layered caching system to try and minimize the database usage. In addition, EE lets you embed and run PHP directly within its templates, very similar to WordPress.
ExpressionEngine has various features such as allowing you to have multiple sites with just one installation of their software. Just as we spoke in the above section dealing with connections and load times, EE has a unique template caching, query caching and tag caching keep the site running at a pretty quick pace by storing database queries in memory to reduce database connections when generating web pages.
WordPress is one of the most popular publishing platforms currently available in the market, and it’s known for being an excellent blogging platform. WordPress is free and open source, and it can be downloaded and installed as many times as you want.
WordPress installations are very quick and easy. It only takes a few minutes for your admin panel to be operational. If coding is not your strong suit, then no worries, WordPress offers its users a WYSIWYG editor (called Visual Editor).
Business Catalyst/Goodbary (owned by Adobe) is a powerful ecommerce CMS for developers. This content publishing platform has an array of useful features such as email marketing and in-depth site analytics. Business Catalyst gives you an easy way for your business to gain an online presence in no time. GB allows you to easily keep track of a customer’s actions, build and manage a customer database of any size, and sell your products and services online. Business Catalyst integrates well with a lot of popular payment systems such as PayPal, Google Checkout and pre-integrated gateways.
Joomla! is an advanced CMS with excellent function and content management. The installation process is pretty quick and easy. Joomla! is a complete CMS allowing you to build simple to advanced sites. Joomla also has super support for access control protocols like LDAP and OpenID, and can interface with popular and open API’s such as Google APIs.
With Joomla!, you’ll have more then 3,500 extensions at your disposal along with the support of an entire community. With a simple extension, you can add almost any needed functionality to your site.
One downside to Joomla! is that their heavy-artillery list of extensions often require you to purchase them. Hopefully, in the future, they will make their plugins free in order to aid users on a tight budget.
Drupal, a great open source CMS supported by a very active community, lets users publish content through any time with very little restrictions. Once the installation is finalized, you will discover features such as forums, user blogs, OpenID sign-ons, profiles and more. This CMS was written in PHP/MySQL for ease of customization and has one of the highest-regarded API’s in the open source content management system field.
Cushy CMS is a hosted and free content management system that’s lightweight, though powerful enough to jumpstart your site in a jiffy. With Cushy CMS, you have to add CSS styles to the sections that you will eventually change or edit. This CMS allows you to access and store content while it uploads this same data to server.
Cushy was built for content editors and designers and so it’s very simple and easy to manage. Being a SaaS, you don’t need to install or self-maintain the CMS.
TYPOlight is great for site builders that will be maintaining multiple sites and is an ideal solution for web developers. If you’re thinking about creating a simple or advanced site design with great functionality, then TYPOlight CMS can definitely get the job done for you.
RadiantCMS is a Ruby on Rails app. Radiant has a very active community for core support and updates. If you are a RoR developer, it’s right up your alley. Radiant has concentrated on making things much more user-friendly for end users and web designers. RadiantCMS also contains an innovative custom tagging language (called Radius) that’s easy to pick up.
SilverStripe is an open source application written on top of PHP and was designed with emphasis on flexibility. SilverStripe has many configurable options and is geared towards content-heavy websites.
This CMS was completely built on its own PHP framework, called Saphire. SS offers content version control and great SEO support. All users alike are welcome to customize the administration area for their clients or themselves.
The only downside with SS is that the default templates are garbage; however, that’s nothing a little elbow grease wouldn’t fix.
Textpattern CMS is a very popular system for many designers due to its simplicity.
Textpattern strives to provide great content management that produces quick, easy, and desirable web standards-compliant pages. There is no WYSIWYG editor because Textpattern utilizes textile markup for content generation.
The backend is very easy to use and follow. New users will learn the administration section with super speedy ease.
Alfresco is a JSP enterprise content management solution that’s quick and easy to install. Alfresco lets you drop files into folders and convert those files into interactive web documents. This CMS isn’t as easy to become familiar with when compared to others, however, with a little bit of time investment, you’ll definitely get the hang of it. Alfresco could be targeted more towards the intermediate developer, although its pure functionality allows it to become very usable. The administration GUI is very organized, well maintained, and easy to navigate through.
