One CMS to rule them all?

New to the series? Then checkout parts 1 and 2.

When I was deciding what topics to cover in my Starting a Blog series, Artjomp suggested I cover different CMSs. It sounded like a good idea, but my knowledge of the broad range of CMS choices is limited. Therefore, this post will serve as a synopsis of the different options available. I will conclude this post by providing links to where you can get additional information.

To begin with I need to define what a Content Management Systems (CMS) is. A CMS is a nifty piece of web based software the makes managing a web site easy. It provides an interface to write post, manage links, presentation, plugins, categories, etc. A CMS is much easier to use than hand coding all your pages. Once the software is setup up, maintaining your site/blog is a piece of cake. Most CMSs don’t require you to write any code…but to harness the complete power of a CMS you will need to do a little bit of coding (at least during the initial setup).

WordPress: is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. It is both free and priceless at the same time. As most of you already know, my site is driven by Wordpress (along with K2). Wordpress is very easy to use and has endless choices of plugins to increase its features. Wordpress comes in two flavors. One is the full powered host and install yourself version and the second is a pre-installed hosted solution similar to blogger. The hosted solution lacks the wide range of flexibility the WordPress is famous for, but is nice for the occasional blogger.

Text Pattern: Many of my friends from Godbit use and love Text Pattern (TXP) and a lot of them are professional web designers. I am contemplating on learning it myself. I did test TXP out several months ago, but it didn’t make sense right away. However, everyone says that once you overcome the short learning curve it is a great and easy to use system. One thing that WordPress offers that TXP doesn”t have an automatic theme switcher, which isn”t a big deal if you are not planning on changing your site design a often. Natilie Jost has an excellent article comparing TextPattern to Wordpress

Radiant: This one is a relative new comer. AKA version .5 was just released. Radiant utilizes the increasing popular Ruby on Rails rather than PHP. Radiant features an elegant user interface; flexible templating with layouts, snippets, page parts, and a custom tagging language; special page-oriented plugins called behaviors; and a simple user management/rights system It looks like it is shaping up to be a nice CMS, so I’m going to keep my eye on this one. My web friend Robert Evans is about to test it out, so maybe he’ll publish a review for us on his site.

Joomla: is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications (at least that is what they claim on their website). Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable. I used Joomla briefly. It was a powerful and pretty easy to use CMS. However, it wasn”t very standards compliant. If you don”t know why standards are important then check out Five Reasons to design with standards.

Mambo: Essentially the same as Joomla. The core of Joomla came from Mambo’s code. I think there was some kind of dispute between the developers of Mambo and since it was open source some of the coders took the existing Mambo code and started there own system (joomla).

Blogger: is a Google service. Since it is a hosted service, the features are limited. It is a good beginners blog. A lot of people (myself, Adnan, Natalie Host) started off blogging by using blogger than migrated to something like Wordpress or Text Pattern after they decide they like blogging and/or want more power. Adnan has a nice article titled Battle of The Blogs: Blogger vs. WordPress.

Expression Engine Core: is a nice feature-rich web publishing system by PMachine. The core version is free for personal, non-commercial use. I”ve tried it out before, and it seemed to be a very nice CMS. However, I preferred an Open Source solution because I have full control and can use it for whatever I want without paying anything. Express Engine has the ability to go beyond a standard blogging platform, but so do WordPress, Text Pattern, and others.

Here is a list of some other popular CMSs. I didn’t provide a summary of these because I have no experience with them.

• Typo3
• Drupal
• Moveable Type (not Free)
• Type Pad (not Free)
• My Space: Just kidding, if your considering a serious web site this better not be your space.
• CrossConnector: A great hosted solution for churchs and ministries.
• MediaWiki (not really a CMS, but thought you might want to know about it in case you ever want to build a Wiki.

Note: Some of systems listed above are more of a blog platform than a traditional CMS. Blog platforms have a lot of the same functionality as a CMS (so much so that most of the time they are grouped under the same umbrella CMS heading), but are geared more toward blogging (which is what we are concerned with). Technically, a CMS is more robust than most blog platforms. However, blog platforms like WordPress are so scalable through the use of plugins that the power difference becomes quite limited.

Additional Resources: Want to take a quick test drive of some of the different CMSs before without downloading and installing them? Then check out www.opensourcecms.com/. This site was helpful to me when I first started learning about CMSs.

www.cmsmatrix.org/ lets you select up to 10 different CMSs from a huge list and then generates a comparison matrix. Wikipedia. provides a quick overview and history of CMSs.

Know of any more CMSs or have experiences with the ones listed? Share your knowledge in the comments below.