The content management system (CMS) that you choose can make a big difference in how much time you will be spending to keep your site updated and maintained on an on-going basis. A CMS is a very powerful tool in web development that can greatly help you reduce development time.

Helpful Tips to Consider When Choosing a CMS

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for a CMS. Your choice of CMS will depend on your goals, technical skills, budget and what you need your site to be able to do. Each CMS has different features and benefits as well as the advantages and disadvantages. You need to determine the goals of your website and how you plan to use the CMS. However, a CMS you choose should:

• Work intuitively
• Have a user-friendly and intuitive admin interface that is well-organized
• Support responsive design
• Include a WYSIWYG editor to allow you or anyone to easily edit the content
• Allow you to be able to extend functionality with available plug-ins and extensions
• Be easy to install and update

There’re a lot of CMS choices available but we’ll be focusing on the 3 most popular open source CMS here: WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

WordPress

WordPress was originally created as an innovative, easy-to-use blogging platform. With an ever-increasing popularity and availability of themes, plugins and widgets, WordPress has become one of the most popular open source CMS in the market. The application is built by hundreds of community volunteers of developers. There’re also thousands of plugins and themes readily available for download that can meet just about any needs and demands.

Perfect CMS for a Blog or a Simple Site: WordPress is suitable for a blog or simple brochure-type site. The admin user interface is very friendly for non-developers. The installation and setup process is very easy. WordPress is also a very flexible platform also capable of fairly complex sites but may not be the best choice compared to Drupal or Joomla. Visit Website

Joomla

Joomla CMS offers middle ground between the more advanced developer-oriented, extensive capabilities of Drupal and user-friendly user interface. It also offers a robust platform and extensibility that allows the website designers and developers an ability to build a more complex site with more capability and options than what WordPress offers. Joomla is designed to perform very well as a community platform, with strong social networking features and capability. Popular sites that use Joomla are MTV, Guggenheim, Harvard University and IHOP.

Favorite CMS Among Web Designers: Joomla is a far less complex than Drupal but a little more complex than WordPress. Relatively simple installation process and setup. Simply take a little bit of time to learn Joomla’s structure and terminology, you will be able to create fairly complex sites in no time. Joomla allows web designers to build a site with more content and structure flexibility with relatively easy, intuitive user interface. Theming for a Joomla site is a fairly easy process and that’s one of the main reasons it has become very popular among the web designers. Visit Website

Drupal

Drupal is one of the most robust and scalable content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It was developed and supported by an active community of Drupal enthusiasts and developers around the world. Drupal requires the most technical expertise of the 3 choices of CMS. However, it is more capable of running some of the most advanced sites. It is also becoming easier to use over time.

CMS for Hardcore Web Developers: Drupal is known for its powerful taxonomy and ability to tag, categorize and organize very complex content. So it is perfect for complex, advanced and versatile sites. It’s also a great choice of CMS for a site that requires complex data organization or for community platform sites with multiple users as well as for large online stores. Popular sites that run on Drupal are Fast Company, Popular Science and The Onion. Visit Website

Before you invest your time into a Content Management System (CMS), make sure to conduct a thorough research. If you ever needed help choosing the right CMS for your website, let anyone at SodaPop Media know and we will be happy to help.