Comparing CMSs

What is a CMS?

A Content Management System, or CMS, is a web application
designed to make it easy for non-technical users to add, edit and
manage a page. It covers the complete lifecycle of the pages on your
site, from providing simple tools to create the content, through to
publishing, and finally to archiving. It also provides the ability to
manage the structure of the site, the appearance of the published
pages, and the navigation provided to the users.

Benefits of implementing CMS
improved site navigation
increased site flexibility
reduced site maintenance costs
greater capacity for growth
reduced site maintenance costs

Every kind of CMS is designed to accomplish the same foundational
goal: manage information efficiently. And all of the types content
management systems share a base set of features. These include:
Storing content
Controlling access to content
Checking content in and out
Managing the lifecycle of content from creation through to
final disposition (archive or destruction)
Allowing automatic and on-demand version control (know the
history of changes and when each one was published)
Searching for content
Publishing content (sometimes)

Open Source Content Management Systems
As the name suggests Open Source Content Management Systems are
applications to build websites that can be freely downloadable
online. With the help of these Open Source CMSs, websites can be self
hosted in just a few clicks. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla etc can be
considered as a few traditional CMSs available in the market holding
major shares.

This article concentrates on the currently three most popular CMS
applications: Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.

WordPress

WordPress was mainly designed for blog websites. However, there
are many websites that are using WordPress' CMS features for
creating and managing a regular website. WordPress is perfect if you
need to create a blog or create a quick template type website and do
not need to add many custom features and functionalities that would
require editing the WordPress core code.

Advantages of WordPress
Multiple Authors: WordPress was built from the ground-up to
accommodate multiple authors a crucial feature for any
serious publication.
Huge Plugin Library: WordPress is the poster-child of the
open-source developer community, which has developed
hundreds of thousands of plugins for it. There are few things
WordPress cant do with its extensive library of plugins.
User-Friendly: WordPress UI is easy to use and highly
intuitive, even for first-time bloggers. You can drop a theme,
add a few plugins, and start blogging within minutes. This
course will teach you how to install and set up a WordPress
blog .
Strong SEO Capabilities: With plugins like All in One SEO, you
can start blogging straight away without worrying about on-
page SEO.
Easy Customization: WordPress theming system is designed
for easy-customization. Anyone with a little grasp of HTML and
CSS can customize WordPress themes to fit his/her needs.
Flexibility: WordPress can be made to do virtually anything
run an e-commerce store, host a video site, serve as a portfolio
or work as a company blog thanks to plugins and customized
themes.
Disadvantages of WordPress
Security: As the category leading software with millions of
installations, WordPress is often the target of hackers. The
software itself isnt very secure out of the box and you will
have to install third-party plugins to boost your WordPress
installations security.
Incompatibility with Older Plugins: The WordPress team
constantly releases new updates to fix security loopholes and
patch problems. These updates are often incompatible with
older plugins. If your site relies on older plugins, you may have
to hold off on updating (which makes your site all the more
susceptible to hack attacks).
Limited Design Options: Even though WordPress is infinitely
customizable, most WordPress installations still look like
WordPress installations. Although recent updates and
improvements in plugins/themes have rectified this problem
somewhat, WordPress is still hampered by limited design
options.
Limited Content Management Capabilities: WordPress was
originally designed as a blogging platform. This has affected its
ability to handle large amounts of content. If you plan to
publish hundreds of blog posts per week (not uncommon for
large publishers), you may find the default WordPress backend
a little underwhelming for such high content volume.

Drupal

Drupal was first released in early 2001. Like WordPress and Joomla,
Drupal too is open-source and based on PHP-MySQL. Drupal is
extremely powerful and developer-friendly, which has made it a
popular choice for feature rich, data-intensive websites like
Whitehouse.gov and Data.gov.uk.
Advantages of Drupal
Extremely Flexible: Want a simple blog with a static front
page? Drupal can handle that. Want a powerful backend that
can support hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of
users every month? Sure, Drupal can do that as well. The
software is powerful and flexible little wonder why its a
favorite among developers.
Developer Friendly: The basic Drupal installation is fairly
bare-bones. Developers are encouraged to create their own
solutions. While this doesnt make it very friendly for lay users,
it promises a range of possibilities for developers.
Strong SEO Capabilities: Drupal was designed from the
ground-up to be search engine friendly.
Enterprise Friendly: Strong version control and ACL
capabilities make Drupal the CMS of choice for enterprise
customers. The software can also handle hundreds of
thousands of pages of content with ease.
Stability: Drupal scales effortlessly and is stable even when
serving thousands of users simultaneously.

Disadvantages of Drupal
Steep Learning Curve: Moving from WordPress to Drupal can
feel like walking from your car into a Boeing 747 cockpit.
Unless you have strong coding capabilities and like to read tons
of technical papers, youll find Drupal extremely difficult to use
for regular use.
Lack of Free Plugins: Plugins in Drupal are called modules.
Because of its enterprise-first roots, most good modules are not
free.
Lack of Themes: A barebones Drupal installation looks like a
desert after a drought. The lack of themes doesnt make things
any better. You will have to find a good designer if you want
your website to look anything other than a sad relic from 2002
when using Drupal.

Joomla

Joomla is yet another CMS that is mobile ready and user friendly.
Today Joomla counts for more than 35 million downloads. Joomla
also offers a huge number of extensions to add additional features.
Joomla is an open-source content management software forked from
Mambo. It is one of the most popular CMS solutions in the world and
boasts over 30m downloads to date. Joomla powers such noteworthy
sites as Cloud.com, Linux.com, etc.
Advantages of Joomla
User-Friendly: Joomla isnt WordPress, but its still relatively
easy to use. Those new to publishing will find its UI polished,
flexible and powerful, although there is still a slight learning
curve involved in figuring everything out.
Strong Developer Community: Like WordPress, Joomla too
has a strong developer community. The plugin library (called
extensions in Joomla) is large with a ton of free to use, open
source plugins.
Extension Variability: Joomla extensions are divided into five
categories components, plugins, templates, modules and
languages. Each of these differs in function, power and
capability. Components, for example, work as mini-apps that
can change the Joomla installation altogether. Modules, on the
other hand, add minor capabilities like dynamic content, RSS
feeds, and search function to a web page.
Strong Content Management Capabilities: Unlike
WordPress, Joomla was originally designed as an enterprise-
grade CMS. This makes it far more capable at handling a large
volume of articles than WordPress.

Disadvantages of Joomla
Some Learning Involved: You cant jump right into a Joomla
installation and start hammering out new posts if youre not
familiar with the software. The learning curve isnt steep, but it
can be enough to intimidate casual users.
Lacks SEO Capabilities: Making WordPress SEO friendly is as
easy as installing a free plugin. With Joomla, youll need a ton of
work to get to the same level of search engine friendliness.
Unless you have the budget to hire a SEO expert, you might
want to look at alternative solutions.
Limited ACL Support: ACL (Access Control List) refers to a list
of permissions that can be granted to specific users for specific
pages. ACL is a vital component of any enterprise-grade CMS
solution. Joomla started supporting ACL only after version 1.6.
ACL support is still limited in the stable v2.5.1 release, making
it unsuitable for enterprise customers.

For a simple blog or brochure-type site, Wordpress could be the best
choice (while very friendly for non-developers, its a flexible platform
also capable of very complex sites). For a complex, highly customized
site requiring scalability and complex content organization, Drupal
might be the best choice. For something in between that has an easier
learning curve, Joomla may be the answer.

Some Newer CMSs


Hippo
Hippo CMS is a Java based, Open Source Web Content Management
platform. Hippo contains an optimal combination of enterprise
architecture capabilities, fast development possibilities and values of
open integration. It enables you to gain the power to be open for
integration with any technology that you require to manage, optimize
and create high-impact customer experiences. Hippo format neutral
way of managing content makes it a great source for publishing into
portals. So, if your extranet or intranet runs in a portal environment,
then it is not necessary to rebuild it with Hippo if you want to
increase it with centrally managed content. Hippo plays nicely with
all major portals and has been integrated with portals like Liferay,
JBoss, SAP and Websphere Portal.
Hippo Pros:
flexible content structure & faceted navigation
integration with some external applications
portal alike functionalities/ integrations
a lot of sub-sites with sharing content capabilities

Cons:
As its icon based it is less than intuitive to use
The structuring of the content by context also adds a learning curve
No obvious way of removing all demo content, nor does the demo yield
many clues of how to create a new site

Magnolia

Magnolia powers the websites of government as well as leading
Fortune 500 enterprises in more than 100 countries on all continents
of the world. It is a leading CMS favored for its ease of use and
license. The page-editing interface enables authors to lay out content
exactly as it would appear to the Web site visitor.
Magnolia is similar to Hippo in lots of ways, except that its very
much focused on managing smaller, single websites. Magnolia CMS
is not a framework to build web applications, however can be used to
manage data. You can for instance manage products and use them as
content for web pages.
Magnolia has been designed for heavy-load enterprise websites,
having a low memory footprint, a smart cache, built-in clustering
capabilities, a distributed deployment architecture that decouples
authoring from publishing and the possibility to build load-balanced
public servers to provide more throughput and availability.
Magnolia Pros:
good for smaller sites (content related); although, Magnolia can be
used on quite big sites as well
need in page editing/inline editing (this is possible within Hippo
CMS but Magnolia is bit easier to setup)
you only have page(content) based site/navigation. Hippo solution
is much more flexible in this regard.

Concrete5
Concrete5 code is based on Model-View-Controller architecture and
object-oriented programming. Some core features are: integrated
server caching, developer API, optional openID, version tracking
system, and search engine optimization.
Pros
Ideal balance between abstraction and customization
Features such as Sitemap are native, and not via plugins
Cons
Needs some more ready-made premium themes (probably a
WooThemes-like provider for Concrete5)
Seriously requires some more third-party resources (probably
a Blog.com-like service for Concrete5)


References:
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_what
http://plone.org/documentation/faq/what-is-a-cms
https://www.udemy.com/blog/drupal-vs-joomla-vs-
wordpress/
https://kb.greengeeks.com/3310/cms-hosting/
http://www.noupe.com/wordpress/wordpress-vs-concrete5-
a-comparative-review-73943.html
http://altabel.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/in-pursuit-of-the-
best-open-source-java-cms/