Which is the best CMS in terms of implementation and customization?
In today’s market there are several CMS that are available in the market. Most of them are open source and you can use then free. Having said this, is CMS the right solutions for maintaining a website and which is the CMS that is the best in terms of implementation and customization.
Answers (17)
Hi there, I have just started using Joomla, it is really easy and intuitive.
Panah R.
Social Media Content Strategist, SEO Expert, Technology Blogger, Wordpress Evangelist, and Internet Entrepreneur
Hi Sudhish,
It really comes down to your case, and what you want to build. Wordpress is a powerful content management system that does almost everything you need in a content management system. Joomla is decent as well but is geared towards portal developers. If you are going open source, make sure you choose a solution that has the backing of a large community and lots of free and premium enhancements that you can use for your website.
With that said, here are a few that you want to consider:
1. Wordpress (MU)
2. Drupal
3. Joomla
4. Pligg
1. Do you need a CMS
In my experience, there's several good reasons for choosing a CMS –
1. Lots of content that needs to be managed (or: content that changes very often)
2. Content that does not always lend itself to living in a database (different structures, bespoke, etc)
3. Several stakeholders who need to update the content
4. Large community of folks who are non-technical or have basic tech skills who need to update content
5. Rapidly changing (growing) site structure – say that you’re expecting to add several features / sections / tools to your site
2. What CMS should I choose
The answer to this part of the question depends heavily on what your reasons for needing a CMS are. As with all other systems and tools, different CMSs have different strengths. It also depends on what your budget, administrative skill level, etc are for implementing and managing the CMS. There are several good resources online that compare various CMS offerings – a good place to start that links off to other resources is Wikipedia…
Hope this helped, and all the best!
Sunil.
The best thing is to develop your own. if it's nothing fancy you need, use a wordpress based system.
Lukasz L.
Senior Python Developer at Bank of America Merrill Lynch
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Hi Sudhis,
Take a look at Plone CMS. Lots of features, easy to use, powerful, big community.
Links:
Dave L.
Social Media / SEO / SEM Consultant for Hire
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All the CMS's mentioned here have their strengths and weaknesses, but they do come at a cost - even the open source ones. Customization is possible with all, but usually requires paid expertise. Vendors love these open source products because they all have a great number of plug-in's from which to pick and choose - so they can easily and rapidly assemble sites. However, ensuring the mutual compatibility of the various plugins, especially along with managing upgrades, is non-trivial.
I love Plone, but I wish I was smart enough to set it up!
If you're looking to customize only look and feel, WordPress and Joomla are good and there is a neat product called Artisteer which allows for the easy creation of new themes.
To add to what others have said, also keep in mind the cost of training users on the new system. If the site is fairly straightforward, with few authors and infrequent changes, go with straight html and get a technical person to update it once in a while.
Shaq A.
Online Expert
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Having worked on Joomla, Drupal, Ektron and wordpress and considered plone too for a very critical project, we used Joomla and I would recommend the same.
Which CMS is the best is similar to the question which phone is the best. It totally depends upon your requirement. I would recommend making a questionnaire to list down requirements of all the stakeholders.
Plone looked very promising, but I guess we stumbled upon some serious issue so had to discard it. Eventually it came down between Drupal and Joomla and considering the fact that most of the users for that system would be non-techies, we zeroed down on Joomla considering the better usability it provided over Drupal. Although technically architecture is more superior than Joomla. I have also heard some complains about the scalability of a Joomla System. But I have seen worse as paid CMS and one of them would be Ektron which was chosen for one of my client only because he had abundance of .net programmers.
I would also recommend to transfer important data to new CMS database structure and check the response time for each.
Wish you all the very best and would love to know which system you chose and why.
Robert B.
Web Designer and Developer, Visionary Entrepreneur
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HI Sudush,
Choosing the right CMS has a lot to do with personal preference, experience, and needs. Trying to find which is best is like asking which is the Best football team. You will neaver get a solid answer.
But if we look at the current situation, we find that the top three as decided by the OpenSourceCSM awards are Drupal, Joomla, Dotnetnuke.
The first Two are PHP/MySQL based. The last one Dotnetnuke is MS .NET/MSSQL based.
We host, design and develop Dotnetnuke websites. I chose DNN because of a few things, but mainly because it seemed to me to be a lot more intuative than the others. I am also more biased towards ,NET than PHP, altho I do program in both.
DNN has tons of Modules and skins available for it. Skins are relatively easy to design. You can either design it yourself or higher someone to do it.
As far as wether one should shoose a CMS for the basis of you website or not, also is a question in and of itself. But my answer is that for adminstration, its much easier with a CMS, over and above the other benifits.
Below I have supplied a URL to our website, you can browse around to see how DNN works as a website.
I have also included an link to a a page with a few article that might help you decide on a CMS or not.
Good Luck
Links:
I am digging Expression Engine for implementation and customization.
Links:
I love Joomla. With version 1.6, which is expected to have advanced user privileges, it will be even more flexible.
Links:
Betsy G.
PHP/Javascript Engineer
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Although the software is free, the time and skill required may be expensive.
As with most projects, start by describing the requirements and giving careful thought to the objectives. Then, you might want to check out http://cmsmatrix.org to identify systems based on those requirements, and http://opensoucecms.com to test-drive them.
I recommend eZ publish. http://ez.no.
Shawn B.
Enterprise Sales Executive at Hootsuite
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Hi Sudhish,
You may want to check out Smallbox CMS. It's a very flexible platform and is very customizable in terms of implementing your design interface. It is a proprietary system that can be tailored to your specific needs.
Links:
Laura W.
Small Business Website Specialist and Trainer
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Whether a CMS is best or not, and which one, depends entirely on your needs and long term growth goals.
It is like asking Which Car is Best.
Laura
Firelight Web Studio
Remember when starting a business cost tens of thousands of dollars and web businesses were funded tens of millions to get out the gate. With all do respect to the free CMS choices out there, I believe that the cost of a paid CMS is trully a drop in the bucket for developing a web business. If you have less development experience it is your best bet for support. Perhaps I am the outside but there is a huge comfort level going with a paid CMS. If your goal is to establish a solid web presence the paid CMS have some great additional features and more frequent feature upgrades... for those that will disagree, let me rephrase this as more frequent reliable upgrades and compatibility.
On the free side of the equation I worked with my web folks using Webgui and was pleased for its ability to tackle a large design assignment.
It really depends more on your needs than anything else. Something that is a perfect fit for one organization may be totally inadequate for another.
At a recent company we chose and implemented Vignette for the public web site. It was an excellent fit for that company and an excellent product for the development team because of the their J2ee background.
Links:
Huy N.
Engagement Manager at 6th Street Consulting
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Sudhish-
It will depend on what you are trying to accomplish. Most of our clients (Fortune 100 companies) are moving toward MOSS implementation since the CMS portion is included out of the box. Since MOSS is a microsoft product, finding specialists/consultants for support is really easy. Where as other CMS system (open source or custmonization), you may run into a support resource problems.
Huy
Take a look at TYPO3. It has strong advantages for multilanguage web-sites and it is one of the most customisable system
