Choosing an appropriate CMS

Here’s a quick soliloquy on the virtues and values of various open-source CMS software packages, along with their downsides. This is not intended as a final say, or a one-size-fits-all guide to CMS’s. This is simply my experience and my personal choices. But I was explaining them to someone else the other day and thought that perhaps this was valuable information to someone who was looking.

There are a range of options for various applications. I use 3 main open-source solutions, which I will detail in a second. If I am forced to work with Flash, I use fCMS to allow content editing. There are also ways to work TinyMCE into a small database system to make a homemade CMS for small sites. You can even do inline editing with AJAX. But if you have a need for a back-end, and don’t want to spend hours programming it, here are some options.

Joomla. I use Joomla on very large sites when I have no choice. There is also PHPNuke but I prefer Joomla, mostly because I like the community support a little better. Joomla spits out a lot of tables and non-standard code and has a complex back end that requires, on average, about an hour of training time with the client. I end up doing a lot of hacking on modules to make them fit into templates and I’ve even gone to the trouble to convert an entire version of Joomla to PatTemplate in order to make it standards compliant. But it’s not stable enough for a production environment yet, so I’m still using the standard Joomla installation. Joomla is highly sought after by hackers. You have to keep up with security updates and make sure you have permissions set correctly, or your web page will be defaced. That never looks good to a client. So to summarize, it’s not my favorite solution, but it is the only choice that I like for very large (40+ pages with submenus) sites.

Drupal. Drupal is ideal for “organic” sites, or community based sites. If you want a site where the content grows from blogs, forums and comment discussions, this is a decent choice. It takes some hacking, but can be made standards-compliant. There are a lot of modules available. It’s great if you want a community of users where everyone can have their own blog, converse via a forum, and the front page reflects current entries and discussions. Templating is relatively simple and it’s a far simpler system to customize than Joomla. It beats Joomla out for community development as well, but is not as adept at handling large amounts of static content.

WordPress. I’m currently in love with WordPress. It’s a blog, but with a little work can become a CMS. If I’m doing a site with 5-10 static pages and a news page and gallery, this is the way I go. A simple back end and easy to use editor. No overkill and it’s easy to template.

I’m sure these suggestions will spark a few arguments. I will admit that I haven’t tried every CMS out there, and that my choices are based off of research that I did as the need for each type arose. Feel free to add your suggestions!