If you wanted to go on the Internet and determine how many searches there are annually for the words ‘open source CMS’, you’d be astonished that the figure is around a million. Couple that with the search results for any similar terms and you hit millions. No denying there are certainly many CMS developer users out there. The question is, if you need one, how do you find a good one? The focus of this article is going to be to try and answer that question for you.
For starters, CMS stands for content management systems. This is a web application created to make it simple for non-technical users to add, edit and manage a website.
Online Research
Well, of course nowadays the Internet has become the world’s gigantic encyclopedia, but one of the disadvantages of that is that everyone claims to be an expert in everything from computers to zucchini, and only a few really qualify as expert in anything. So it is with CMSs. That’s why a little caution is prudent so that you don’t get fooled.
WordPress
If you have a small to medium-sized business then WordPress is the CMS for you. It is only moderately expensive and not too complex, but you should be certain before you adopt its use that your site will not be growing too much down the line. That could prove to be more than WordPress can effectively handle. In actuality, however, WordPress is geared more towards the general public. So if you’re flying solo or perhaps a member of a minor club or society and just want to get an ordinary blogging site or news site up and running, WordPress will do just fine for your needs.
Unfortunately, while it has its advantages, WordPress can become overwhelmed if your business needs become complicated, involving what are called multiple content types such as blogs, news, product information, etc. that require being connected to each other in order to receive information from each other. What will happen then is that you are going to have to undergo the costly and fairly tumultuous experience of having to migrate your data and processes to a more powerful CMS capable of tolerating more demands being made upon it.
If you know in advance that your business is going to be rapidly growing, then your best bet is to choose either Drupal or Joomla as your content management systems, rather than WordPress. It can save you a whole lot of grief down the road.
Drupal or Joomla For Large Businesses
Well, the choice isn’t too difficult because either one of these CMS is excellent for building more complicated sites. They both have a very good track record, have been in use for several years, and should you need to resort to online help, there are plenty of Drupal or Joomla users out there who are willing to lend a helping hand. In fact, the community can be quite friendly, even to those new to Drupal. The main distinction between the two is that Drupal is designed to lean more toward the developer. Learning Drupal requires a lot of hard work, because there are so many options that it offers. Joomla is great for creating complex websites, but there is far less to learn, making it a lot less taxing on the brain and a lot less frustrating to use. So it’s really a matter of examining each system closely, weighing the pros and cons, and determining which the best for your particular business needs is.
Have to disagree in regards to WP only being for small to mid sized businesses. I used to use Joomla for my biz clients thinking that it was better for more complicated solutions. This is wrong. WordPress can handle just about everything better and in almost every case, easier than Joomla or Drupal. In regards to capacity, I currently manage one site that serves around 500k page views/day on WP. After developing on Joomla for years, WP is now my go to CMS for just about everything.