What are you looking for in a Content Management System (CMS)?
By JB on Feb 21, 2007 in Miscellanea | Print
Welcome! This site specializes in providing tips and tools for Business Analysts and systems development in general. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. If you'd prefer, you can also receive my posts directly to your e-mail. Thanks for visiting!
Content management is a huge consideration for online businesses, whether they be peddlers of their own wisdom, software, or even durable goods.
There are currently a host of Content Management System (CMS) packages available. You can spend a fortune on purchasing a system and having it installed professionally, or you can go the open source route and do it yourself at little to no cost.
The best way to decide which package you want is to determine what you need it to do. Once you’ve established your business requirements, you may also want to find out what other “bells and whistles” are typically available in a CMS package.
Nueronic-IT has done a really nice job of gathering some common requirements requested by CMS customers and providing an assessment of the Top 40 CMS Features.
Based on those features, I can make a few recommendations of some open source packages that I am either using, or have at least tested.
- Joomla. I use Joomla for my personal blog and have found it to be the most flexible and feature-rich of the open source products.
- Drupal is another, feature-rich system that has just undergone some major updates.
- I evaluated PostNuke for a little while, and really liked it. It is a little more “boxy” than Joomla, and doesn’t offer as many plugins or templates, but is a classic with a huge user community.
- If you’re looking for a Learning Management System (LMS), then Moodle is an excellent choice.
- If you’re hooked on Microsoft technologies, ASP Nuke might be just your thing. It’s a modular Active Server Pages Web portal supporting MySQL/SQLServer.
Other packages that are worth a look, but that I know less about include: Xoops, TYPO3, Geeklog and PHP-Nuke.
In the end, you may just determine that blog software like Wordpress will suit your content-management needs just fine.
If nothing else, hopefully this post will make you aware of the features and some of the pakages that are available to you for your use.
3 Comment(s)
By Andreas Maratheftis
on Feb 22, 2007 | Reply
Hi Jonathan
Thanks for commenting my site. Although open source CMS (and although i use one myself),a lot of the users i have interviewed during requirements workshops wanted an application that functions like a desktop app! You downlaod it install it and bang! it works! That’s what we are aiming to do for our version 2 CMS. Incorporate some WEB 2.0 modules that will make the whole process transparent to the user. I still think that open source CMS’S do not cover that, you will still need to set-up a databse etc, so you do need to be a little bit technical and understan the whole process.
By Andreas Maratheftis
on Feb 22, 2007 | Reply
Sorry bout this,,,another feature that i didn not mention on my site, is multilingual features- for users to be able to translate their site to any language easily!
Thanks
By JB
on Feb 22, 2007 | Reply
Agreed. Localization of language and measures is a key feature for the system that will have a multinational reach. Most “hands-free” translations are still kind of sketchy if you need a true translation of key material, but even that is getting better all the time.
Thanks for the comments, and thanks for the great content.