What is CMS?

CMS stands for content management system. A CMS is a software application designed to store, manage, and format web information. Common CMS applications include blog software like WordPress, or site management tools like Joomla! and Drupal.

The problem with websites

You have a website or intranet. It grows organically over time. Soon you find that much of the content is out-of-date or inaccurate, it becomes increasingly more difficult to find things, the appearance is becoming dated and updating the site has always been complex.

Worse yet, you’ve lost track of all the pages on the site, and by having all the changes made by a skilled webmaster, the updates are piling up in their in-tray.

What was on the site last week, or last year? You couldn’t say. In the back of your mind, you know that this could leave you in a difficult position if a customer sues, but there is little that you can do.

If this sounds grim, you are not alone. In fact, it is the natural by-product of maintaining a site using manual tools such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage.

Thankfully, these problems are what CMS is specifically designed to solve.

The benefits of a CMS

There are a wide range of business benefits that can be obtained by implementing a CMS, including:

streamlined authoring process
faster turnaround time for new pages and changes
greater consistency
improved site navigation
increased site flexibility
support for decentralised authoring
increased security
reduced duplication of information
greater capacity for growth
reduced site maintenance costs

What flavour of CMS is right for you?

Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress.

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a completely free, open source content management system that many intelligent organizations are using today to cater to their needs. Drupal's many features and add-ons allow it to be used for a variety of website needs; perhaps for marketing, internal communications, informational websites, or for social networking purposes.

Drupal's access control system means that it can be easily applied to your organizational structure. Overall, Drupal is a good choice for organizations of any size because it is free to install, easy, and incredibly flexible.

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including:

Community web portals
Discussion sites
Corporate web sites
Intranet applications
Personal web sites or blogs
Aficionado sites
E-commerce applications
Resource directories
Social Networking sites

What is Joomla?

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular website software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone. See video.

Click here for a full list of features

Extensions that can muscle up your Joomla! website

The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

Electronic commerce
Blogs
Collaborative authoring environments
Forums
Peer-to-peer networking
Newsletters
Podcasting
Picture galleries
File uploads and downloads

and much more.

And then there's Wordpress

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.)

Some key features of WordPress