What are you looking for in a Content Management System (CMS)?
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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.
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