Neal S.
Author, Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales & Social Media Marketing | Social Media Agency Executive, Coach & Speaker
For first-time web developers, which free CMS do you recommend and why? I have been recommended Joomla and WordPress.org...any others that I may be missing out on?
I am looking at creating a website for the first-time, and I have been told that using a robust CMS is the way to go. I need plug-ins to integrate the popular social media platforms, community participation, blogs, user authentication, Paypal, et. al. Your thoughts on which platform would be the easiest to get up and running on AND has the plug-ins available that I need?
Good Answers (12)
Jason B.
Lead Project Manager, Founder at Launchfront
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Hey Neal, I was in the same boat as you over a year ago. I've tried and tested MANY solutions looking for the ones that had flexibility, functionality, and a great development community.
I broke it down into 2 different uses:
A quick, feature-rich, easy to use solution - For small websites, blogs, sales pages, portfolio, and light CMS activities.
A more robust, powerful, scalabe solution - For larger websites, communities, portals, etc.
After months of reading documentation, reviews, and forums, and testing out demos and things, I found the best 2.
1. Wordpress - Awesome platform, and much more than just a blog. Can be used for nearly anything. This is a great solution for sales pages, portfolio sites, small business websites, and much more. Easy to deploy, open source, great FREE theme selection and great user interface. The development community is huge and very active.
2. Drupal - An amazing, robust platform. Drupal has the tools to build extremely powerful sites. Community portals are no problem at all, flexibility is off the charts, and it's just an all-around great CMS. It's a little difficult to learn, but the documentation is great and the community is one of the largest out there.
Joomla is another one of the more robust CMS program, and it has a great reputation, but it just didn't hit me as user-friendly. The shiny back end panel looks better than Drupal, but the functionality and ease-of-use just didn't hit it with me. It seemed like it was overall very difficult to manage and get used to. After using Drupal, and then trying Joomla, I immediately ended up going back to Drupal.
All of the programs I've mentioned are built on PHP and I really love the feel of PHP websites, as compared to the ASP.
I suggest you try out Wordpress and Drupal, and compare them to some of the others, you'll see a night and difference in the feel of the CMS.
I've tried Dotnetnuke, Silverstripe, CMSmadeeasy, Mambo, and a bunch of the other more popular solutions. All of these solutions are a far cry from Wordpress and Drupal. There was just no comparison.
Links:
I think you'll find Wordpress to be the most user friendly to get started with. Joomla and Drupal are also very good but each comes with a higher learning curve. (Drupal being the higher of the two)
There are a ton of plugins and templates for all of these including shopping carts, galleries and such. If your just starting to get your feet wet I'd go with Wordpress.
Cheers,
~Dave
There are many CMS out there, Joomla is among the most popular. It is very flexible, you can build any kind of website. The biggest advantage of Joomla is the big community behind it and the huge amount of plugins. Another popular CMS is Drupal, with very good community and user management features. With Wordpress you get a very powerful blogging system, a big community, many plugins and a very intuitive/easy system. On the other hand the Wordpress CMS is built around the blog concept, you don't have the flexibility of Joomla or Drupal. All three CMSs use PHP and MySQL. There are many other CMS out there, see also http://www.cmsmatrix.org
Elizabeth A. M.
Six Sigma Master Black Belt, SharePoint Administrator, Founder, ThinkOnIt Bible Ministries, Author, Teacher, Speaker
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I hope this doesn't offend you. But Microsoft Office Live offers free website creation, template driven design, html modules for customization, and a whole collaboration side of it with shared workspaces too. It offers branded email accounts, web site reporting all for free. It's a great beginner's platform. You can even build your own pages and upload using advanced settings. Check out a my site below (not bad for someone without web experience).
Links:
WordPress would definitely be your best option. I have been working with WordPress and Joomla for the past couple of months and I lean towards WordPress because it's easy to use and easy to install widgets that are specific to your site and needs.
Links:
I have used Wordpress and Joomla. Both are good platforms.
But when I needed to include social activities to the site - such as registration, creating profiles, allowing users to contact each other, etc. - Joomla seemed to be much better than Wordpress. In Joomla you can use the Community Builder plug-in. While it may take some time to set it up for a novice, it can do just about anything. The PeaceCorpsWorld site (still in development) listed below uses CB in Joomla.
The online community has come in handy to answer questions and I found the Joomla community to be extensive and friendly. The Wordpress group wasn't always helpful to a beginner.
I would also recommend checking out all of the great free templates for both Wordpress and Joomla. It is easy to find something that makes the site look appealing and professional. The TellBarack site below is a Wordpress template that I found and liked a lot.
Good luck!
Links:
Drupal is great. It's open source. It has a great community behind it and you don't pay for anything not modules, not code, nothing. The clients I've turned on to it love it. But like everything worthwhile, you need to spend some time getting to understand it so you can develop and manage your web site effectively.
Drupal and Wordpress will have all the plug-in options you'll need. I use both and think Wordpress is as user friendly as it gets for a blogging tool; however, if you want to offer more than just a blog go with a CMS like Drupal.
Links:
John B.
Web Developer, Internet Mystic, Pizza Lover
Best Answers in: Internet Marketing (1), Web Development (1)
You could start a free hosted blog on blogger. What eventually happens is the client either stops blogging or eventually wants more features. So they make the painful move to another platform like WordPress.
Once on WordPress some doors open as they see they can create other pages as well as posts, so they can then create a "site". They have some modules that help you do a little SEO and some other tricks. What happens is they often hit "The WordPress Wall", which is eventually they learn enough to say, "I want a store", "can I have people log in to my site?", etc, etc, and they find that the module offerings for WordPress aren't all that robust. So they make an even more painful move to another platform like Drupal CMS (more painful because now they have a bunch of content to move).
Drupal is built to handle more than is likely you'll need. The community is huge. Drupal is used to create well known sites like MTV and Sony Music Artists. But its also pretty easy to use out of the gate for tiny 10 page sites as well.
Save yourself some woe. Use Drupal. But why believe me?
Drupal WebWare 100 WInner:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13546_109-9729862-29.html?tag=blog
Drupal #1 Open Source CMS:
http://www.packtpub.com/article/2008-open-source-cms-award-winner-announced
The top 3 most popular CMS now that are being used by most of the web developers and site owners are Drupal, Joomla and DotNetNuke. Sadly, Wordpress is tailing behind the three. I've tried and used these three and had observed their own pros and cons. You might consider these personal reviews:
Drupal - Robust and powerful for intensive and content savvy website. I find it very efficient on e-zine, news portal and blogs. One of its cons is its forum module which I find it less intuitive compared to PHPBB and vBulletin. But if you are meticulous in tagging, taxonomy and content architecture, it's the right CMS to go.
On the developer's side, the only caveat I had was it's so tedious and hard to install. You may find tweaking the site template a monster once you get into a complex layout design.
Joomla - It's a sweet but tough CMS. Sweet in the sense it's easy to deploy and install. You may find running it with your site in less than an hour once you get the hang of it. It's tough in the sense it has a lot of vast free modules available online that address most of complex requirements of a large scale website.
It's ideal for e-zine, community site, e-commerce, entertainment portals. Only caveat that I have with it its its blog modules. I cant find any suitable blog module that could work at par with wordpress or drupal's blog functions.
DotNetNuke - It's the only (i think) open source CMS that's done in Microsoft's .NET platform. If you're a solid fanboy of Microsoft, then this is an idol for you. It could integrate both AJAX technology and ActiveX modules on your site without sacrificing your knowledge in VB and .Net skills. There are lots of pretty modules available online that you can just plug it in right away but apparently, most of them aren't free.
DNN is well used in portals, e-commerce site and entertainment sites. Cons that I have are; most modules aren't free, resource hogger, lame caching system and ugly Administrator's panel.
Again, these are my personal observations and they might be a good reference with your decision in choosing which CMS would you go for. Still, the best base of your judgement are your site's requirements and where would you think you'll be more comfortable during the development.
Drop me a note if you need more insights on this topic. Hope this helps you. :)
Sean D.
Writer, Editor, Instructional Designer, Content Wrangler, Musical Dabbler
Here is a portion of an answer I posted to a similar question:
If you choose a CMS, and especially if it is open source, you or the business owners will have to be diligent about installing patches and updates. ALL of them are targets for hackers and any open door in the code will be found eventually. And if a hacker discovers a Web site is using a vulnerable version of any given CMS, you can be sure that site will be defaced and/or erased. Or worse, some sort of Perl or PHP script will be installed so as to send out thousands of spam emails per day. I have seen it happen, and it has happened to me.
That being said, I have used Joomla, phpWebsite, WebSite Baker, and various blog applications. Joomla used to be clunky as far as linking pages together but I have not used it in a couple of years. WebSite Baker (see link) was the easiest to use IMHO, but I don't know about its security. You might even consider using Blogger (see link). It is Google's blog solution and probably as secure as it gets...
Silverlight looks good to me. I was not familiar with it. But I think WebSite Baker is a good fit for you.
Links:
Mr. Jade C.
• Professional Web Producer • Search Analyst • Search and CMS Consultant • Technology Research [TopLinked.com]
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Hi Neal,
I recommend Wordpress with its 'Famous 5-minute install' and probably 2-minutes if you are using Fantastico. :)
Wordpress has evolved into a full on CMS and is no longer just for blogging. At the end of the day you need a CMS that can be updated by your content providers without any technical knowledge using a wysiwyg editor. You need a CMS that is easy to maintain where the presentation layer(Wordpress Themes) can be easily customised, business logic are modular(Wordpress Plug-ins and core codes) and your hosting infrastructure(PHP/Apache/MySQL) are affordable if you are a startup biz.
To give you an idea of the number of Wordpress Themes available visit http://themes.wordpress.com/ and http://www.antsmagazine.com/100-superb-wordpress-themes-for-free/
There are SEO plugins to help you optimize your contents, plugins for Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and others to save you time developing the PHP code from scratch. If you love to code then there are plenty of sources and information on the Wordpress site to help you.
Here is the address for the latest Wordpress plug-ins http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
If you want to play around with Wordpress before signing up with a hosting company go to http://www.wordpress.com and sign up for free. Try to get a feel of the administration dashboard...
Enjoy! :)
Mr.Jade Cadelina
http://jade.cadelina.com
http://twitter.com/cadelina
Links:
Ashley G.
VP Business Development at Criteria
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You omitted the key elements of background any of us needs in order to make you a realistic recommendation and those are: how frequently will the site change, who is the site going to be used by and how big is your staff.
If the site content will be contributed by multiple authors, change frequently and be viewed by large numbers of casual visitors, you might need a CMS. If not, all these packages are overkill.
Generally:
WordPress for a blog site with one or a few bloggers. Alas, the documentation is crappy and even the published books on WP are worthless babble. Fortunately, you can start small and grow if you want a blog-type site.
Joomla for a magazine type site where content is more like articles than blogs. The science fiction publisher Tor (www.tor.com) uses Joomla. Joomla is quicker to get something going if you want to do what it does. Joomla has an extensive library of functional modules and well developed Administration tools.
Drupal for a site that will be built for a custom purpose where no fine-focused CMS will do. The Onion (humor site) is Drupal even though it looks like a magazine. Administration tools are going to be unique to whatever you build in Drupal and must be built as you build your site. There's a steep learning curve and a lot of work, but much reward.
If all you want to do is to "integrate" the popular social media sites you can just link to them. Maybe you only need a template site builder like RapidWeaver (Mac) or several for WIndows.
Both Joomal and Drupal are built on PHP and require MySQL. These are big, serious tools but less costly than the IBM Websphere monster.
No group of volunteers is going to be able to tell you just how to do this. But I'd allow for adequate planning. Nothing is worse than picking a tool and discovering it is the wrong tool halfway into the job.
More Answers (25)
Ricardo S.
Founder at OnTechies.com
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Neal,
I would also recommend DotNetNuke and Umbraco, these CMS are based on Microsoft ASP.Net and are open source. DotNetNuke has a lot of plug-ins available, you can check this site to see some of those plug-ins available for it:
http://www.snowcovered.com/snowcovered2/
Links:
Jeff M.
Director, People-Centered Economic Development UK
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I'm a fan of DotnetNuke because of the way in which I can add value to legacy SQL Server applications and features such as localization which allows multi-lingual sites to be constructed easily.
Each CMS will have benefits in a range of different applications. Those mentioned already are also well featured.
Hi,
As OS CMS I kindly recommend http://ez.no/; to compare different CMSs please see also http://opensourcecms.com.
Carmen
I would suggest Expression Engine. Very good CMS, comes in several flavours - core source, personal or commercial. Based on PHP and MySQL.
ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich content management system that empowers thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies around the world to easily manage their website.
Links:
Felipe O.
Software engineer at Atakama Labs
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Besides the aforementioned ones, probably LifeRay, which is a Java based CMS.
Links:
George L.
Internet Marketing Manager at 361 Designs, Inc
Best Answers in: Customer Relationship Management (4), Web Development (1)
I would add Mambo, Drupal and Concrete5. I don't think you can go wrong with Joomla though.
OSCommerce may deserve a look because it is well rounded and designed for eCommerce sites.
I suggest hosting on a LAMP stack. Lots of community and professional help available out there for it.
I really like ExpressionEngine. It's PHP/MySQL. Completely open and extensible. Big user community. Great membership features. I use it for my wife's site: www.southportlander.com
We utilize CMS Made Simple when we need to incorporate a CMS for a client. It is very easily extended through plugins, but allows us to maintain the handwritten, optimized markup that we are proud to write...
Links:
You're definitely missing out on Drupal - www.drupal.org. At the very least Drupal is serious competition for Joomla, and is far more advanced (indeed simply different) than Wordpress. I'd encourage you to Google for reviews of Drupal and comparisons of the above, there are many...
Links:
LifeRay is a great java-based CMS, and is capable of supporting large enterprise deployments. Lots of plug-ins and other modules.
Links:
I've heard good things about TypePad, which center around blogs, and CMS Made Simple also. There is also a newer one called Magento, which seems to center around larger-scale e-commerce sites.
Links:
Hi!
I'm suspicious but I loved Joomla!, I have a virtual store based in this plataform and all the components, modules and plugins I found for my company.
I'm not a programmer but I did this website by myself.
At Jommla Extensions website you have the idea of all resources you will have to build your website.
Regards!
Links:
Lilian A. also suggests these experts on this topic:
there are many.
Wordpress is good for blog style
magento is good for online shop
Joomla is good for others
they are all very good and very easy to work with
mike
www.jimmygraphic.com
Links:
Here's two that are not in the list below:
http://lightneasy.org - Has to be the most simple CMS. Not very powerful or feature packed, but if you just need to put up a website and maintain content, you just can't beat it. You will need to know CSS to skin it. I comes in two forms, one without a database and one the runs on SQLite. Makes portability a breeze.
http://www.silverstripe.com/ - I did my Masters Thesis on end-user web development. This was my chose for CMS, even though at the time it wasn't a very mature product. Since then, it's really developed nicely, and they've published a 130-page manual to go along with it. The problem with many open source CMS products is a lack of clearly written documentation. This is the product used for the Democratic National Convention's website in 2008. I highly recommend taking a look at it. It's easy to install. Doesn't come overloaded with bells and whistles you'll have to figure out how to turn off.
Links:
Clarification added March 25, 2009:
One more thing:
http://opensourcecms.com/
Go here to try out a whole bunch of different Open Source CMS products. They're all installed and provide access to a site and admin page. In addition, there's blogware, learning management systems, customer relationship managers, the whole lot.
I would recommend Joomla if you are trying to get into doing some nice website design with a very functional content management system. Wordpress is made primarily to be a blogging software, therefore most of its plugins are centralized around blogging and communication.
I find Joomla very easy to learn. In fact there is a book called "Joomla! A Visual Quickstart Guide" That will actually take you from installation, to content addition and administration all the way to custom templating.
If you are farmiliar with xhtml and css then the templating system is VERY easy. Especially if you pick up that book I recommended and simply follow it through to the end.
Joomla also has multitudes of free extensions like community building components, ecommerce, calendars, billing systems, project management, SEO, and more.
If you ever get caught at a point where you need help with a custom template, our company, Webot Media can actually create these Joomla templates for $199 from photoshop design to complete working template.
Links:
I sell sites, and OS commerce took me 3 days to be learn. I made a user guide for client in french.
I have prospects who worked with Joomla and were very satisfied.
You cannot make blogs with OS commerce: just à newsletter, a follow of articles, and the managing of you shop is very easy!
Ashwani B.
Software Developer, Ecommerce, LAMP, Yahoo Store Developer at Netvision Resources Inc,
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Wordpress. No Doubt on that. Ease of use and expandability is the key.
Lukasz L.
Senior Python Developer at Bank of America Merrill Lynch
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Hi Neal
Just to add another CMS to our list - Plone.
