Learn more about Tyler Dockery, and the Dockery Design team at www.DockeryDesign.com.

Customer Management Software (CMS): A Primer

At Dockery Design, we know that most web designers and developers prefer Building their websites by hand. If  this turns out not to be an option, they will follow up by building websites with open source CMS, because they got a lot of support from online web communities. Rapid development of plugins for these open source software’s made them popular and web designers first choice. Depending upon the support, online communities and contributors, plugins/add-ons you will wish to give a system of rankings to these CMS. I have selected what I feel to be the top 5 free and Best Content Management systems in an effort to give you a good overview.

Wordpress

wordpress latest logo 100x100 Customer Management Software (CMS): A Primer

Tyler Dockery Suggests: Wordpress for most blog and small-site needs

Although Wordpress is released first in 2003, its root came from b2 that started in 2001. Wordpress is a simple Content management system. Wordpress also has lots of support from online communities, hundreds if not thousands of beautiful and advanced themes coming weekly, some 6,830 plugins at present included in wordpress.org but there are plugins which can only be found by searching in google. Wordpress.org is hosting over 1,000 themes at present, and many developers make their themes available every day.

The Wordpress platform is used mostly used in making blogs and E-commerce sites. Wordpress is easy to manage and use in day to day updating purposes. Most blogs on the web are now running Wordpress, and support to Wordpress is excellent.

Wordpress is SEO friendly and automatic pinging to popular search engines is enabled by default, user friendly URL’s are also a large advantage that makes Wordpress blogs more SEO friendly.

One disadvantage is that without the proper plugins, Wordpress doesn’t have an inbuilt forum like Drupal or Joomla. Theming is often free because there are many more web developers who create Wordpress themes. Due to heavy competition, specialized theming costs will be less. If you are planning to create large, non-blog websites, Wordpress may not be your best choice.

Wordpress.org

Drupal

drupal Customer Management Software (CMS): A Primer

Tyler Dockery Suggests: Drupal for CMS on larger sites

Drupal is considered by many to be  the best open source Content management system available. Its support community is bigger than any other CMS on the market. There are also a huge number of Modules/Plugins available for Drupal.

At the time of this writing, there are 6487 modules for Drupal 6.x and more than 8000 modules for all combined versions. You will have to spend your time Theming, but once you have a good theme designed, your website can become powerful and flexible.

Since the Theming of Drupal takes time and resources, don’t expect to be provided these themes or to have these themes developed for free. Although not a large amount of themes are available for this CMS (unlike Wordpress), but used in the creation of flexible and huge websites.

The main disadvantage with Drupal is its complexity. Many peole feel they have to struggle just to get up to speed. A custom made Drupal theme costs you min of 200$ and maximum it can go to 1000$ or more. Drupal is SEO friendly, You can create custom URL’s to posts and categories, automatically ping to search engines when the website is updated.

Drupal.org


Joomla

joomla Customer Management Software (CMS): A Primer

Tyler Dockery Suggests: Joomla CMS

The third place goes to Joomla for best Content management software after Drupal and Wordpress. It also has beautiful support from online communities and has plenty of plugins. You can make an average website which can be more powerful than Wordpress. Joomla is supported by many modules and a large support community. Unlike Drupal, many theme developers are making their theme available for public use.

You can build online tutorial sites, E-commerce sites, daily updating blogs, college websites and more with Joomla. So, when you are building a huge site with thousand’s of webpages, this can be a great choice.

Theming for Joomla will be more expensive than Wordpress theming, but not very costly when compared with Drupal.
Joomla.org

Mambo

mambo foundation Customer Management Software (CMS): A Primer

Tyler Dockery Suggests: Mambo CMS

Mambo is a full featured CMS platform that can be used in making anything from small websites to large corporate websites. You can find hundreds of plugins and add-on packs which makes your Mambo website do more for you. Some of the extensions include forums, multimedia galleries, e-commerce and shopping carts, document management tools, customer relationship managers and lot more.

Mambo is easy to install and once your site is ready, creating and updating content is easy and even a novice user can do it. Mambo has support from online communities.
Mambo-foundation.org


MovableType

movable type 300x65 Customer Management Software (CMS): A Primer

Tyler Dockery Suggests: Moveable Type for Blogging

You get a great deal of control over your website with Movable type and there are many plugins and modules that support this platform.

The pitfall with movable type lies in its is lack of support from online communities and few if any developers give online support. So, you find you have to wait for an answer to a problem for a long time, you may not ever get an answer.
Movabletype.org

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