The Best Content Management Systems (CMS) for Your Website
To manage websites, online stores, blog and forums, you need what is known as a content management system that helps you fluently manage online content. CMSs serve a variety of purposes. For instance, WordPress is for blogs and basic websites, while Shopify is for eCommerce websites. A CMS provides the front-end, which is the website itself, and a backend/administration, which manages the website content and other features.
A content management system lets you take control of your website, without having to know HTML or CSS. Also, modern CMSs have marketing and SEO plugins built in to make it easy to promote your website. Here are some of the best content management systems for your site.
WordPress
WordPress holds over 58.9% of the CMS market, making it the most popular CMS in the world. Originally developed as a blogging platform in 2003 by Automattic, WordPress went on to dominate the CMS market with support for thousands of plugins and themes developed by open source developers worldwide. It’s still under active development by the WordPress Foundation and released under GNU GPL v2.0 license. You can install WordPress on your domain practically within 5 minutes, using its “Famous 5-Minute Install.” Automattic, the company behind WordPress, also provides a commercial blogging platform at WordPress.com, where you can build a blog as a subdomain of WordPress.com.
Learn more about WordPress in the video above.
Joomla!
Joomla! is a highly popular open-source content management system used by nearly 78 million websites. Released in 2005 and provided under the GPL license, Joomla! offers more than 7,000 extensions to provide additional functionality. Used by corporate websites, intranets, e-commerce sites, government websites, school websites, etc., this is a highly versatile CMS.
Drupal
Drupal is one of the oldest content management systems still under active development. It was released in 2000 and provided in GPL v2 license. Developed by Dries Buytaert, an open-source programmer from Belgium, Drupal is also one of the heaviest CMSs, with a size of 80MB uncompressed. Drupal has a large and active community that is rampantly developing thousands of plugins and themes.
Shopify
The most popular eCommerce platform available, Shopify is a powerful eCommerce application and CMS. Due to Shopify being a hosted platform, it makes managing the website, code updates, security patches, and more even easier than an open source CMS such as Magento. Shopify makes it very easy to update content, category, products, orders and more. Learn more about building a website on Shopify.
Learn more about the different Shopify plans and options in the video above.
MODX
MODX is an open-source, developer-friendly CMS written in PHP and distributed under GPL. It allows you to individually manage the content, design, and interactivity of the website by separating HTML, CSS, and PHP elements. One disadvantage of MODX is that it requires you to know web programming to develop a site, although having this ability provides you with additional flexibility and functionality that other CMSs don’t.
Magento
When it comes to e-commerce websites, Magento is the preferred CMS. Magento provides all the tools and features required to develop a full-fledged e-commerce website. Magento’s beautiful backend dashboard shows you the performance of your e-commerce site. You can add products and manage your customers efficiently with the CMS. Initially released in 2008, the system is developed using PHP and provides three platform variants–Community Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Enterprise Cloud.
PhpBB
PhpBB is the premier CMS package for bulletin boards. PhpBB was released initially in 2000 under the GPL license and is currently running version 3.2.x since 2016. This CMS features fully customizable user registration, forum moderation, powerful plugins, private messages, user groups, etc. According to BuiltWith, around 13,750 online forums use phpBB.
ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine is a powerful CMS that has both free and commercial editions. ExpressionEngine, developed by the Oregon-based EllisLab software company, provides several intuitive templates, add-ons, and extensions. It’s easy to manage different types of content using this CMS, and the sites built using ExpressionEngine work seamlessly across all platforms.
Blogger
Although not technically a standalone CMS, Google’s Blogger is also a highly popular blogging tool. It is also one of the oldest blogging platforms out there still in active development. Released in 1999, Blogger allows you to create a blog of your own (for free) as a subdomain of “blogspot.com.” However, you can also purchase your domain and point it to your blog to make it look like a professional website. Blogger has evolved over the years and provides several intuitive themes to create great-looking blogs. Also, Blogger powers almost all of Google’s official blogs.
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