According to wiki a content management system (CMS) “is a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment”. In other words to ease up the content management tasks on a website, a webmaster uses a CMS. The procedures described in the definition are meant to allow multiple people to contribute to and share stored data.Open source community is a large pool of people – amateurs, professionals, free lancers, experts and enthusiasts, who work with the technology and put up the updates and upgrades of the technology for everyone to see and use.
Open source CMS are extensively used these days because all the glitches and bugs, if any, are tested for by the large open source community and necessary patches and thatches are done.
A CMS can be used to manipulate data in any form – be it documents, pictures, audio, video, and others as well. An enterprise may deploy a CMS to store, control, semantically enrich, revise, and publish documentation related to organizational process. There are a great number of open source CMSs available on the Internet, one just has to find the right one to suit his needs. The most popular ones are WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Typo3.
WordPress, the award winning Open Source CMS, started as a blog builder and now has come a long way to be an individual full-fledged content management system. The first impressions of the system are that it is quite easy to operate, simple, and free! On can make multiple accounts online or WordPress can also be used to run our own website and even on the local computer (localhost). The best part of the CMS is that it supports a large number of plug-ins and the templates are changeable at will. It was awarded the best CMS on the Internet because of its inbuilt search engine friendliness for SEO purposes. This will always rank a website top on the search engine indexes.
Drupal on the other hand claims to be the best current CMS defeating the Joomla prowess. It is easy operational functionality are used to maintain simple as well as large professional websites. It might be touted as better than Joomla but has fewer plug-ins as compared to the same. It has not found many users in the developing countries, but has a humongous fan following in the greater Internet development market.
Joomla was one of the pioneers in the CMS market to bring in open source characteristics to the
web content management system. It claims to have the largest user base in the open source CMS world. Joomla frequently launches updates of the main CMS as well as the supported plug-ins (which has the tallest number as well). Being famous in the open source community, many developers are constantly adding features and functionality to the Joomla CMS, and the releases are free to update and upgrade the existing systems. The default version may not support search engine friendliness a la WordPress, but it has components for SEO.
Other popular CMS are
Typo3 and
Mambo that have all the desirable features of a CMS. In spite of their user friendliness they have not yet managed to pip the biggies off, but they certainly are capable of doing so in the near future. Every CMS above has its own strengths and weaknesses, but it is solely on the user for which CMS to select that suits their work perfectly. The choice is personalized and is dependent on the individual interests and needs. There is no reason to promote any particular CMS here, as each one them is a significant contributor to the open source CMS community.
