What’s Your CMS?

Sep
30
2008

Posted by: Antonio Wells in Categories: CMS, Web Design.
Using Tags: ASP.NET, CMS, CMS Made Simple, open-source, PHP, Sitefinity, WordPress

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.

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1 Comments

1 Comment until now

On January 28th, 2009 Joe Beazelman Said:

Sitefinity is the best one on the market. The WYSIWYG content management interface makes it extremely easy to teach someone how to use it. You also get a good feel for how the site will look and function.

The only free product that comes close is Sitellite, a PHP based solution from the WYSIWYG point of view. The product is still on the market.

I think it pays to pay for quality commercial software since you know the bugs will be fixed eventually. The spit and polish from the point of view of the user should never be trivialized. I found that many of the open source products tend to leave things out years after its release.

Eventually many of these products suffer from entropy. A few guys work on the product with no income and the rest of the community feeds of off their good will, giving little or nothing in return. To add insult to injury, many in the open source community will cry foul when an open source project is appropriated by a commercial entity.