Content Management Systems Compared
A hugely important task to maintaining a quality web site that gets good levels of traffic and high rankings in search engines is a steady stream of useful content. Perhaps the best example of this is Wikipedia. Because it is user-generated, millions of articles are updated daily. Their entire collection is one of the most useful sources for information available and is also one of the most scalable databases on top of that. The system itself, though, would be impossible without some powerful content management applications.
If you’ve never been exposed to a content management system of any kind, well, you’re looking at one. This entire web site is customized using several tools and raw scripts that make it possible for me to maintain the content of this site. To generate all the HTML for each update would be too tedious and time-consuming.
But what content management system to use? Deciding on one can be a costly investment in either time or money, or both. I will offer my recommendations, but the only way to truly know what works best is to demo each one separately.
Drupal
I’m a fan of Drupal because of its structure. You can design nodes, individual elements that serve custom purposes. It also behaves well with templates and permissions so that you can have others with less access privileges edit specified areas of content. The security is as good as anything else I’ve seen, and it’s open source which makes it free and up-to-date.
WordPress
For blogging, the best I’ve used is WordPress. It’s actually very easy to install if you’ve ever installed a PHP program before. And it’s got a beautiful administrator’s panel that makes blogging easy. It’s possible, and I’ve seen it done, to use WordPress as a content management system on top of blogging. In this regard, I think it’s quite powerful, but you may need to know some HTML to get it to work professionally.
CMS Matrix
CMS Matrix lists dozens of content management systems and lets you compare all the features. After giving one CMS a try, you can refer to this site to make solid comparisons.
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