Content management systems, popularly known as CMSs are great tools for web development. You can get your site in minutes with a decent CMS. These CMS’s enable developers to manage the various types of content on their site ranging from text, images, audio and even video. This is very important especially when you are dealing with a lot of content such as a blog with multiple posts. Designing a website using a CMS is also way easier than writing the code for a website from scratch.
There are a lot of CMS platforms out there to choose from. These can be customized to fit the developer’s needs and the purpose for which the website is being built. However, out of all these Content management systems, three stand out; Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. These stand out due to their unique features and the ability to be extended and built upon using various plugins and themes. We review these three one after the other in the following paragraphs.
WordPress was designed with simplicity of use in mind. It has a very large collection of themes to customize a site according to the developer’s needs. WordPress development is a simple matter as the community is large and always willing to help. There are also lots of tutorials online which you can easily learn from hence it has a very smooth learning curve. You don’t need any technical skills to work with WordPress. WordPress website design is therefore a simple option for anyone regardless of their skill levels. Anyone can manage a WordPress site and the user support and the WordPress community is great. WordPress is an ideal choice to pick when you are developing websites which are fairly simple sites which are easy to manage. It also has the option of having add-ons in order to enhance the functionality of the site.
Drupal is an open source content management system that can be used for a variety of functions ranging from making news publishing sites, community portal sites, educational sites and also social networking sites. It is built using PHP which is a web development language and being open source, anyone with PHP knowledge can built upon it and fine-tune it to their needs. Drupal, however requires a developer to be technically experienced in order to work with it. It has a powerful naming system and the ability to organize and categorize complex content. It also has a variety of plugins known as modules that one can use to extend the functionality of Drupal. Drupal is best used for advanced sites which require a lot of complex modifications.
Joomla on the other hand, has a simple installation procedure and you don’t need to learn a lot in order to be able to use the CMS. It still offers the developer the ability to create some fairly advanced sites. It has some exceptional social networking features since it was built with the community in mind. It has several plugins which allow for more control over the features of the website. You can also build complex websites with it too.
In the end, your choice of a CMS will boil down to your requirements and level of skill at the time. Whatever ones choice is, sticking with it and working on it will ensure one is successful online.