There are popular CMS systems: Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Of course, WordPress is mainly used for blogs, but can be configured as a platform for an ordinary website or even an e-shop. There are less popular, but more suitable for people who come from the IT background and like more freedom in regard to programming and HTML code: Maxsite, Frog CMS, CMS Made Simple, E107, Typolight and others.

PHP-based CMS systems are expected to have at least the following features

1. Ability to edit pages using an online MS Word-like editor (also known as WYSIWYG - What You See IS What You Get).
2. Ability to categorize pages, add them to menus.
3. Ability to manage navigation system through the site using menus, breadcrumbs, sitemaps and other standard means of navigation.
4. Ability to customize page layout using templates.

Besides most of the available PHP open-source CMS will have plugins contributed by third party PHP developers, such as eCommerce, discussion forums, user profiles (with avatars), blog (unless the blog format is the default one, like with WordPress), some tools and functions for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), tag clouds, social media shortcuts and a lot more. You can choose which plugins (or, in the case of Drupal, modules) you need and which ones you don’t need, thus minimising your system and at the same time making it meet all your needs.

Most of them have an overwhelming number of features, which creates a problem for a business user, as extra features make it difficult to configure administer and support the web-site based on it. This brings forward the necessity to hire an experienced webmaster who has worked with the CMS of your choice and can help you out of most problems. It’s also possible that you won’t find a plugin/module for your sophisticated business logic and will have to hire a programmer to write it for you from scratch.

When selecting an open source package many would go for a feature match. They will prepare a list of required features, and then see if pre-selected PHP-based content management systems match that set of features. But having a feature does not yet make this feature easily available for the end user; neither does it make it easy to use. For example, any PHP-based CMS will have a feature of adding pages, but how easy is it for you to do? If you are unsure, it’s a good idea to arrange a training session with your designer beforehand, so you are taught all the essentials once the site is ready. Besides, if you are adding a dozen of simple pages daily, clicking through a few times and then selecting a few options just to post a page can be a substantial time overhead.

Some system can be configured to hide/bring out some functionalities, but will it be easy to do? How much of you valuable time it will cost, or how much should you pay to a developer for doing this?

So, to summarise, this is our advice on the choice of the CMS:

If possible, go for a system you have a previous experience with. If you are entirely new to it, find a good developer, and go for the system they consider a good one (find out why). In experienced hands, Drupal is as good as Joomla; in unexperienced hands Drupal is as bad as Joomla. If you trust your developer, and they are a stable company, even a bespoke system will do - but make sure they teach you to use it, so you don’t depend on yoru developer forever.

Why so many agencies create their own PHP-based CMS systems? Because it will probably take as much to learn an open source PHP CMS as it is to build a new one. Besides an open-source system will probably have its own software architecture paradigm, which will not match the paradigm the agency use for creating other web applications.

What are other options? Maybe you do not need to stick to a community-developed open-source, but search for an open-source system developed by a commercial vendor? Even the most enhanced open-source systems like Drupal or Joomla could never compete with commercial systems, like Bitrix, for instance, in terms of either flexibility and comprehensiveness or the quality of support. Also, it doesn’t really have to be PHP. Both Java and .NET have a variety of robust enterprise-level content management systems, some of them are quite easy to use.

PHP CMS Systems used for particular purposes

Here are some e-commerce CMS based on PHP: ZenCart, Magento, osCommerce. There are others and they all have an overwhelming set of features specific to e-stores. they all are relatively easy to install and customize, but it’s still a good idea to ask an experienced webmaster to do this job for you. Also, most good CMS’s have e-commerce plugins/modules, for example Drupal has Ubercart, WordPress has WP e-Commerce and Joomla has VirtueMart.

Blogging platforms

Here, no doubt, WordPress has no rivals. It has the most blog-specific architecture as installed out of the box, the highest number of plugins written with bloggers’ needs in mind. Its history has been the history of a blogging platform, and the community that develops WP has always payed the highest attention to what a blogger might need. Of course it’s not perfect and has some subtle bugs - for example it’s not unusual to change the current theme and discover that due to a subtle bug in the platform it lost all your themes and, consequently, your blog is no longer available. It might take an experienced web developer to fix this; if you are unexperienced, the only way out of this is reinstalling the blog and losing all the content. Sounds scary, but, fortunately, happens very seldom.

Of course, it’s possible to build a blog using Drupal too, but it will be heavier, requiring a mroe powerful web server and at the same time it’ll have fewer features than a WP-powered blog. Drupal has always been developed as a general CMS with the blogging side considered secondary, and it shows.

Here are a few others. None of them, except WordPress, is very popular though. Serendipity used to be, but couldn’t compete, and at some point they had to delete the list of their proud users from their own website. Guess why? While it was still available, half of the links led nowhere (the blogs had ceased to exist), and the rest of those blogs had switched to WordPress. But it’s still possible to download this script and many others for those who’d like to test them and let us know how it was.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Internet Technologies for Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.