One of the most popular resources at the moment for creating websites is to use a content management system such as WordPress, Joomla!, or Drupal. A content management system is basically a software system that is often created as an open source program; however, there are other content management systems that are privately built.
WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal are robust, free content management systems that can be customized and built into your own look and feel by using themes which are pre-built that you can modify. A positive element of using a content management system, especially an open source content management system, is that you have the power of thousands of people working together to build, manage, and improve the software.
That doesn’t mean that these systems will be 100 percent foolproof and won’t have some issues going forward. There can be various technical issues that you may come across when you’re using this type of content management system. However the major platforms do offer a great deal of flexibility, and are typically not very difficult to install, customize, and manage for someone with moderate technical experience.
| Name | Website | About |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | http://wordpress.org/ | WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. |
| Joomla! | http://www.joomla.org/ | Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone. |
| Drupal | https://www.drupal.org/ | Drupal is open source software maintained and developed by a community of 630,000+ users and developers. It’s distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License(or “GPL”), which means anyone is free to download it and share it with others. This open development model means that people are constantly working to make sure Drupal is a cutting-edge platform that supports the latest technologies that the Web has to offer. |
| ExpressionEngine | http://expressionengine.com/ | ExpressionEngine is an interested hybrid of commercial and open-source software. The base code for the ExpressionEngine core is built on CodeIgniter, which is their own open-source PHP framework. But the commercial aspect of the CMS means that theres committed developers and technical support people focused solely on EE. |
| TextPattern | http://textpattern.com/ | TextPattern is probably one of the more overlooked CMSs out there. TextPattern is a highly flexible CMS, though, thats easy to use out of the box and easy to customize by designers and developers. It uses a tagging system to make content retrieval and display easily controllable. TextPattern uses Textile to quickly convert plain text to valid XHTML in your articles and content, which makes it very user-friendly for less technical users. |
| Contao | http://www.contao.org/ | Free, PHP-based, Contao has a user interface that incorporate Ajax and other Web 2.0 features to improve usability. It includes advanced editing features for content, including editing multiple records at once or rolling back to prior versions of content. It also includes a number of common built-in modules. The calendar module supports multiple calendars, all-day and multi-day events, open-ended events, and syndication via RSS or Atom. |
| SilverStripe | http://www.silverstripe.org/ | SilverStripe is an open source CMS that is well-suited for developers and designers who are comfortable with code. They have recipes and tutorials for beginning developers, and plenty of modules for things like blogs, forms, and forums. Code is isolated in Sapphire, so designers can use whatever HTML and CSS they want to style their sites. It also supports multiple page templates to support different needs. |
| Umbraco | http://umbraco.com/ | Umbraco gives designers full control over design aspects, and focuses on web-standards and a completely open template system. There are starter kits and skins available to make it faster to get started. Its also easy to integrate Flash and Silverlight content into your Umbraco-based site. A number of high-profile sites are built on Umbraco, including the Heinz and ABBA sites. |
| concrete5 | http://www.concrete5.org/ | concrete5 is not only a powerful CMS, but can also be used as a framework for developing web apps. Designing sites is easy, and can be done at a variety of levels. You can start with a theme and then override styles without touching the code. Or you can code your own themes with HTML and CSS. If youre comfortable with PHP, you can use custom templates that can override the way any block looks. |
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