Choosing the right CMS

Posted by Ed NIce on 23 October 2009 | 0 Comments

Tags: CMS, content management, open source

This is a question you will see a lot on the web.

Ask a question like 'What is the best CMS?' and 101 people will give you 101 different answers.

The really simple answer is ask someone to provide one for you. If you want to do it yourself or utilise internal resources, that's cool too. Read on...

CMS applications and frameworks are divided into 2 distinct categories. Those that are free or open source and those that are paid for. Some offerings are free to use, but may charge for the source code. There are very few real differences between free and commercial CMS applications, other than the level of support they offer, the development opportunities available to the user and the cost.

I have checked out and evaluated many of the more popular offerings, most of which are really good. I do have my favourites and have strongly promoted several that cover both sides of the technology divide, differ in complexity and allow bespoke development without too many constraints.

I'm not going to tell you which one to use. After all, there is a champion for each and every available open source CMS so I don't need to get involved.

So how do you go about choosing one?

First of all, you need to ask yourself a few basic questions.

Asking which is the best CMS is like asking which in the best car or musical instrument. It all depends on what you are going to do with it. It mght well be a beutiful 1950's Sunburst Les Paul, but it's useless in the brass section.

So, in order to help you decide, you need to ask yourself:

Who will be administrating my CMS?
Where am I hosting it?
Who will be updating it?
What content will it need to have?
Will pages be added regularly?
Which technology path am I following?
How soon do I need to be up and running?

So why these questions?

Well, [in no particular order] you need to assess your level of competance or the level of competance of the person who will be installing, configuring and skinning the site.

Trust me, there is a steep learning curve with content management systems.

If you are a programmer or have a good knowledge of html/css and computers, you'll probably get to intermediate pretty quickly, so don't be put off by something that at first glance looks totally unfathomable. Just expect a few long, frustrating evenings.

If you are a developer or run web sites already, you'll probably have a pre-determined group of applications in mind. Yes, I'm talking about Microsoft v Linux. Or more specifically, .NET/MSSQL or PHP/MySql.

Ask this question 4 or 5 years ago, this would have be a no-brainer. If you wanted an open source anything, it was all PHP based. There were a few asp offerings, but they were nowhere near the maturity of the PHP based apps. Now that has all changed.

With a different attitude to open source software and with asp.net becoming more mature, we are seeing some really useful asp.net based CMS frameworks out there.

So, decide which technology works best for you. This is considering templating, hosting, administration, integration and most of all, comfort. After all, whatever you choose, it only sends out html, so as long as you are comfortable with the environment, that's a good choice.

Because many CMS applications are now quite mature, they offer so many things out of the box. You should get most things you need, including friendly urls, blogs, news, galleries and a lots more. This means you should be able to cater for most basic web site requirements by simply installing the cms, setting it up and skinning it.

If you or your clients want something a little bit extra, you need to consider a few more things.

You now start to see why your technology choice is important. If you need something out or the scope of the base install, modules or extensions, you'll probably need to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in with some dev work.

At this point, it's important to understand how your chosen CMS will react to changes. Can you work in modules or extensions without changing the underlying application? If not, you are slowly moving away from the project dev tree, which can mean you may be isolated and restricted when appling changes and updates. This is certainly a real consideration for users wishing to extend cms frameworks. Why is moving away from the base application a bad thing? Well, it means you lose the simplicity of upgrading based on the original source, which means you may miss important things like bug fixes, security enhancements and most of all, features and functionality. You can still make it all work, it'll just take some work to patch it all together.

So, we've highlighted some of the things for consideration. Here are the tips to help when choosing a CMS.

1. Make sure the chosen framework has everything, within reason, that you need to work for your site.

2. A good sign is an active group of contributors and good help resources, reflecting a well maintained application.

3. Check web sites that are using the CMS. Do they all look the same or are they truly expressive?

4. Play with the admin section. Does it make sense? Will the least experienced user be able to use it?

5. Can you add things to the CMS without changing the original code? Does it support modular development if I need to add to the site?

6. Will the site give me tools for SEO?

So there you have it. Far from a completely exhaustive list but hopefully there are some helpful things to consider.

Thanks for reading.