What’s the Best Content Management System? It Depends…
There are a dizzying number of systems on the market that are or can be referred to as Content Management Systems. Determining which content management system is right for you starts with an understanding of the different types of systems and the range of functionality available. Analyzing your needs is critical to selecting the right system.
When I am at conferences or seminars, people like to ask me “what is the best content management system?” I usually squirm and hem and haw and then state, “depends on what you need it to do.” It’s not the answer that people want; they want me to name Product A or Product C and save them lots of time and effort in selecting a content management system on their own. Selecting the right content management (CM) system can be a lengthy and exhausting process, as the content management landscape is a very crowded and confusing one.
Leading the confusion is the lack of a real industry-standard definition of what a CM system is or does. I’ve seen one definition stated roughly as “content management describes any system that allows people to more easily change and update content, especially on their websites.” [1] Not much help, but in the absence of a clear “official” definition, many vendors appear to have adopted it as the definition by default. That is why there are hundreds of systems—ranging from Web Loggers (bloggers), to file management, to code management, to databases—that describe themselves as Content Management Systems.
Types of systems
So how do you approach your own content management evaluation? With so many systems out there, no one really has time to evaluate all possible CM offerings. To start, you can roughly categorize CM systems based on their use, then select systems to evaluate based on the type you need. The categories include:
- Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
- Web Content Management (WCM)
- Digital Asset Management (DAM)
- Learning Content Management (LCM)
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According to CMS watch, there are several open sourced CMS review that i’m going to list here.. in my blog..
Drupal :: (website)
HQ: Global
“Whiile it is also frequently used for simple website hosting, managing static websites does not fully leverage Drupal’s unique capabilities and may indeed expose weaknesses in more traditional WCM functionality…”
OpenCms (website)
HQ: Global project
“You will need experienced developers to make a sophisticated content application using this platform. Although the product is quite extensible and its feature set is decent, customization will be required for each and every application, in particular in areas of integration and migration of content, where OpenCms does not offer very much out of the tarball…”
Magnolia CMS :: (website)
HQ: Basel, Switzerland
“Many advanced CMS packages do come with a bundled, “light” version of a third-party commercial search engine…These packages generally cannot be used in a delivery environment, and usually come with a mixture of other limitations as well, including…”
Joomla! :: (website)
HQ: Global
“The most important strength of the project is the volume of third-party extensions – both commercial and open source. On the flip side, due to its absence of workflow and inability to define custom content types, Joomla! remains weak for traditional enterprise scenarios.”
eZ publish :: (website)
HQ: Skien, Norway
“Note that as a dual-license package, this software has been a creature of a single commercial parent company (eZ Systems) to a much greater degree than any other open source package in this report, save Alfresco. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; you may find, however, that the eZ community just feels a bit different…”
Alfresco ECM :: (website)
HQ: Maidenhead, UK
“The product’s workflow capabilities are average. Day’s visual- and forms-based workflow designer is easy enough to use and supports parallel workflows. However, Day’s task-based engine may not be as intuitive for organizations whose processes engender a lot of collaborative content development. If you fall in that category, test Communiqué carefully against a handful of your more important processes…”
Zope :: Content Management Framework (CMF) (website)
HQ: Global project
“As low-level development platforms, major open source platforms are strong and getting stronger – especially Zope and OpenCms, which have been refactored multiple times and remain less tied to their original implementations than most others…”
TYPO3 :: (website)
HQ: Global project
“While its LAMP architecture makes it possible to run on inexpensive hardware, the application is relatively resource-intensive due to the layers of abstraction and complexity built into the architecture. Whereas simpler PHP-based WCM systems are customized by modifying or writing PHP code, TYPO3 has implemented a whole new configuration language that needs to be parsed and interpreted by PHP which is, itself, an interpreted language. The flexibility of the database design has a performance cost as well. The net of this is that low end, shared hosting plans are impractical for most sites…”
Plone CMS :: (website)
HQ: Global project
“Plone’s preferred operating system is Linux. This is what most people run Plone on, and where you could expect to get the best results and the most readily-available support. However, Plone can also run on Windows and Mac. Almost any Unix system can also run Plone (Solaris, AIX, etc.), but the Plone team advises against using Sun Solaris for running Plone, arguing that the threading model in Solaris is especially punitive for long-running, multi-threaded Python applications, and will make Plone seem quite slow…”
Midgard :: (website)
HQ: Global project
“Role management remains a bit weak (Figure 287). Midgard has users and groups, but no notion of roles, which helps explain the halting development of workflow features. One gets the sense that the product is not used on sites with scores of contributors…”
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