Antonio Wells. Web & Multimedia Designer

There are a wealth of Content Management Systems (CMS) out there to choose from… so what’s your choice? I will speak on the ones I have dealt with, would like to deal with and their Pros and Cons.

Integrating a CMS into my design work-flow makes my digital life so much easier because it allows for website content to easily become manageable and scalable. Before it was a nightmare editing and managing static webpages. Though it’s very ironic as the advent and usage of a CMS would eliminate pay I can earn as a Webmaster for maintaining websites, but surprisingly it increases demand for the need of a webmaster who understands the CMS.

I have an extensive history in PHP since most applications are open-source, free and widely used. At my current job, we are an ASP.NET shop so making the switch has been challenging in minor ways; that being the ASP.NET community doesn’t have a lot of good open-source, free and widely used CMS Apps.

Here are some CMS I’ve dealt with and their Pros/Cons:

CMS Made Simple is a free open-source CMS built in PHP.

CMS Made Simple is a great tool for building a website! I built the NAMYnot Multimedia Inc. website in it.

Pros:

• Simple to install and customize
• CSS & Web Standards based designed
• Modular and Extensible
• Fairly simple to design a template around once you understand the Smarty System
• (Feature I love)You don’t have to look at PHP code… This system uses Smarty Tags, which are references to snippets of PHP code
• Offers User and Permissions management
• Easily add new extensions from the Developer community with “1-click” installs
• Huge developer community for help and support
• Offers may options right out-of-the-box

Cons:

• The Community developed Extensions can lead to Trojan intrusion (see my post on CMS Backdoor Spam Trojan)
• (Can be seen as a Pro and Con) Updates are very frequent, by the time you finish designing a website from concept to completion, a 1.x release is out…
• Not a huge community of Templates (for the design-challenged)

WordPress is a free open-source PHP Blogging software, but it has great benefits as a CMS.

There are many people using WordPress as a simple CMS for their company website as you get the best of the Blog world with the ability to add Pages. I can go on-and-on about the Pros but would try to KISS. Here’s a client website built with WordPress.

Pros:

• World’s simplest installation. Their “Famous 5-Minute Install” is true to the statement.
• One of the most popular Blogging softwares out there that offers easy CMS capabilities
• Huge Designer and Developer community plugins for scalability
• WordPress offers Web Hosting
• CSS & Web Standards based designed
• Modular and Extensible
• Offers User and Permissions management
• Easily add new plugins from the Developer community with “1-click” installs. What’s even more cool, if your plugin crashes… Wordpress will disable the plugin to avoid system-wide issues.
• Huge developer community for help and support
• Offers may options right out-of-the-box

Cons:

• Traditionally a Blogging platform

Sitefinity is an ASP.NET Design/Developer oriented CMS by Telerik

Sitefinity is Awesome from 3 perspectives: End-Users, Designers and Developers. For End-Users, it works out-of-the-box with plenty of options and features, for Designers familiar with designing in Visual Studio… templating is a breeze, for Developers… custom controls and DLLS can be created to make the website do virtually anything. We developed my company website in Sitefinity.

Pros:

• Fairly easy to install
• Great for Designers and Developers using Visual Studio
• Built with the Telerik Controls
• CSS & Web Standards based designed
• Offers User, Workflow and Permissions management
• Bundled modules are powerful (news, blogs, polls, etc) making for a well-rounded site
• Offers may options right out-of-the-box

Cons:

• Comes at a cost, but this also buys you customer support and free updates for 1 year
• Plugins are not community driven but custom plugins can be created by your Developer

I would love to hear what you/your firm uses and why.