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A COMPARISON OF CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (CMS)

 

With all the Content Management Systems offered for free [open-source] on the internet, it’s rather hard to pick one that will benefit your website or blog in the best way. Among the most popular are Mambo, Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal. These Content Management Systems [CMS] offer an open-source download to an enabled PHP and/or MySQL web host, many features for publishing and editing, promotion, and theme customization, and user-friendly communities. While it’s important to choose a CMS that enables the easiest and swiftest publishing, development of more advanced applications on the website is top priority to attract attention. All services offer a community of promotional as well as low-key developers who readily make available their finds and applications to all users [free plug-ins].  These four CM Systems are excellent, but each one offers a different set of features and key points to aid your publication in a multitude of ways.

While WordPress isn’t ranked as one of the top, well-known management systems, it offers a solid array of features that can help protect, ensure, promote, and solidify your publishing. Within these features are:

- Full Standards Compliance: To ensure that code is universally accepted in the W3C.  WordPress has this feature to make your code viewable no matter what.

- CrossBlog Communication Tools: WordPress supports both Trackback [sites can communicate their newest publishing as well as related content], and Pingback standards [which notifies the user if their content is linked on another site].

- Spam Protection: Protection against comment spam, which is an issue with so many bots being developed.

- Multiple authors: Multiple Users are able to edit the content on different levels: [administrative, basic, and other users].

- Ping Away: Maximum Exposure to your site/blog on search engines.

Drupal, which some say is the most popular of the four, offers a different set of features that are still equally as valuable, but benefit the user in a different way… Meaning, their features and services are oriented towards a developmental area. Their features include:

- Modules: Drupal contains a series of well-developed modules and applications readily made available due to its open-source community and forums which enable users to communicate.

- Role based permission system: Users are automatically grouped into two categories: registered and unregistered. Registered users obviously have access to more features than the unregistered, but even if you are unregistered, Drupal offers a great variety of features.

- Threaded comments: This enables long-winded discussion on a certain post or forum, which allows for versatile promotion.

- Multi-language: Drupal was intended to be a multi-language platform, and thus offers a multitude of languages for users to be able to fathom a multi-lingual blog with translations, should they choose to do so.

- Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X support: Drupal offers support for all these systems and servers, permitting users to be able to edit their content no matter where they are.

Joomla, another popular CMS, is also offering the basic package as well as several features that others have as add-ons.  Its popularity is generally due to its innovative media-oriented CMS framework, a facet which many have come to appreciate. It is user friendly, with easy-download options as well as extensions and availability to make your own applications or modules. Features include:

- Media Manager: An easy manager for media files/folders, where configuring the MIME type is an option! It’s integrated into the Article Editor, thus making it available to manage files of all kinds at the same time.

- Banner Management: Joomla enables banner management- creating a banner or campaign has never been this easy! Once you’re done creating them, you can edit or set impression numbers and special URLs.

- Menu Manager: A tool that allows the creation of menu items/menus as needed, providing something completely separate of your content. Customization of the menus also allows different styles and looks, to differ and stand out on your publication.

- Powerful Extensibility: The fact that it’s open-source allows for hacking and development of more and more tools to custom-fit to your needs. The magic of Joomla is that with so many users, most being talented in web development, extensibility has no limits.

 

Lastly, Mambo, another well-known Content Management System is aimed at corporate website developers, small to medium business developers, and family or personal site developers. While it does cover a large array of consumers, it’s centrally focused on corporate applications and development.  Features include:

- Advanced package/Add-on/Template deployment system:

- Content syndication (RSS): RSS [Rich Site Summary] feeds help update users and administrators of new updates and regularly changing web content. This aids businesses in a lot of ways.

- Advertising management (banners, etc): It’s important for a business to have the right advertising to aid flow to their site and support their providers/related companies.

- Mambots: Mini programs which aid the user with shortcuts to their publication. They serve as activation tools for programs, a shortcut to a script, and/or perform functions in the Component and database.

It’s important to choose the right CMS for your needs. Customization of applications and bots are vital to getting every nook and cranny the right way to promote your necessities in the best way. Drupal, WordPress, Mambo, and Joomla contain specific features that you can use to easily customize your publication.  While each has a lot to offer a consumer/business, the right CMS for you or your company is usually based on a personal preference.

Neda Ilieva
2K Computer Solutions