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Content Management System (CMS) Reviews

How to use CMS systems to provide community support

Background

These pages contain discussion on the use of Content Management Systems (CMS), and reviews of the main open source products (that use Apache, php and MySQL).

Content Management Systems (CMSs) are based on a database holding the content, and templates controlling the look and feel. These do a lot of work for you and provide a solid platform with a professional look and feel.

Please see the updates below, and the main Introduction.

You Might Benefit from a CMS if...

Two Main Contenders

Two main CMS contenders seem to have emerged, Joomla and Drupal. There are hundreds of others but few with a critical mass of users and independent developers.

Joomla

Joomla grew out of Mambo, following a crisis of control in 2005.

The Joomla CMS has a separate administrative backend, which is fine for site admin but a little tortuous for content creation and editing.

First you need to create the content, then attach it to an appropriate menu. Content can be categorised but only in a two level hierarchy of Sections containing Categories. This is OK for many websites, but is not as flexible as Drupal.

Most of what you need for a simple site is there in the standard distribution, and can be extended from the thousands of contributed modules and themes.

Joomla CMS is good for a small or medium sized website, for which it provides a professional framework and a wide variety of optional plug in functions.

Drupal

Drupal is described as more of a Content Management Framework than a CMS. It is an application for building almost any type of website, including user driven Web 2.0 sites. Its categories use a free format Taxonomy enabling many different dimensions of selection.

All content is housed in a heap or bucket, with appropriate tags for multiple Categories. The Modules select content based on some analysis, to be displayed in a Block (such as a menu) to selected users or Roles. This layered approach is very flexible, very abstract, and very powerful.

However the Drupal CMS Core is very minimalistic, and hardly usable for even a simple website without various contributed modules, of which there are thousands.

The saving grace from a usability point of view is the Edit tab that shows automatically on any content page that you have the privileges to edit, much quicker than with Joomla.

Drupal is good for complex, dynamic and user driven websites, and can have inherently excellent search engine optimisation.

My Experience

My firstexperience was with phpNuke, and then PostNuke, for the Quakernet sites from 2002. Both were very buggy, which led to various spin offs includng Mambo.

In 2004 I used Mambo for www.qbl2004.org (since withdrawn), very usable dispite the inflexible menu structure with its "Sections" and "Categories".

I used Drupal 4.7 in October 2006 for FindhornLight.Con, (since discontinued), because of the strong community and the collaborative Book environment. Since then the Menu and Category problems have been sorted out.

More recently in 2008 www.NextGEN.cc was developed using Joomla,and there are other Joomla projects under development.

I am now in November 2008 using Drupal 6.6 to re-develop this site (www.ellipse.co.uk).

Review Sites

There are now two sites with in depth reviews of short listed CMSs, plus CMS Review which is a bit over the top.

Please see the side panel.

Next Page

Introduction to CMS Systems, requirements and positioning of Content Management Systems

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