Content Management Systems
Author: Tiara Rea
If you are new to building websites online, you’re really in luck these days, because you have unlimited options for building your new website. You can buy a web design template and simply use that, if you sign up with Lunarpages you can use our WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) website builder PageMason, you can signup for LPQuicksite, you can buy Dreamweaver or use Frontpage, and tons of other options depending on your comfort zone and skill level.
But there’s one solution that is often overlooked, even though it can really save you money and help in getting your website designed and even developed, all in one breath. I’m talking about using a Content Management System or CMS if you want to sound all savvy. 
A CMS is just what it sounds like: an easy way to manage your website’s content. For non-techie users or those new to web hosting, using a CMS is a very affordable way to add great style and easy updating for your website. A CMS also includes the ability to install advanced features (or plug-ins) to really extend what your website can do.
Here are a couple of my favorite content management systems, all of which are free, open source projects:
Definitely the Godfather of content management these days, even though some people do argue that WordPress isn’t exactly a CMS. If you want to get technical, it’s just a blogging platform, but people are using it more and more for managing all aspects of their website. For example, we use WordPress for our Newsletter here and our own Blog, and I use WordPress to manage other websites of mine as well.
The Pros of WordPress Web Hosting: It’s fall off a log easy. Maybe even easier. And it’s 100% free, you can install it with about 3 clicks of your mouse via the Lunarpages control panel, and there are thousands upon thousands of Free WordPress Themes (templates) you can download and use.
The Cons of WordPress Web Hosting: It has its limitations, as it’s designed to be a blogging platform…though that’s never stopped me and countless other from using it.
The exclamation mark makes it sassy. Joomla! is one of the forerunners of CMS, and has really become synonymous with that term – you say “CMS”, I say “Joomla!”! This is because it’s been around a long time and is a really powerful system, which can help you improve website performance, incorporate RSS Feeds, enable printable pages, news flashes, add blogs and polls, paste website search tools, and all this can be done in a million languages.
The Pros of Joomla Web Hosting: Once you get used to it, there really isn’t anything you can’t do. It’s also 100% free and just like WordPress you can install it via Fantastico in about 3 clicks. Besides the gazillion free Joomla templates and skins out there, you can also find reliable Joomla extensions, which when installed add features like ecommerce shopping carts, advanced RSS options, advertising units, and a ton more.
The Cons of Joomla Web Hosting: It’s really not easy to get started, which is unfortunate because many people miss out on the chance to utilize Joomla’s extensive features. If you have the time to learn it, Joomla is a great choice.
Read all about b2 from last month’s awesome interview with Francois Planque, one of our favorite guys to chat with!
b2evolution is, like WordPress, primarily a blogging platform. But so many people recommend and use it for their websites that I can’t keep from adding it to the list. Plus, I love it, and it’s a powerful system for managing your websites with incredible advanced features you can learn as you go. One of the main things people like about b2 is its ability to manage multiple blogs under one single installation. This simplifies the process and just saves you so much time in the long run.
The Pros of b2evolution Web Hosting: Easy, Free, Simple. Lunarpages-recommended.
The Cons of b2evolution Web Hosting: Limitations as far as content management goes and there aren’t as many templates/skins out there for you unless you’re willing to customize them yourself.
And those are just 3 of the available choices you have. There’s also Drupal, Mambo, DotNetNuke (Microsoft-based CMS), Expression Engine, Typo, and many others. To start, check out the ones listed above, but if you have recommendations or experience of your own, feel free to shared with us so we can spread the word!
May 30th, 2008 at 10:05 am
I’m digging Joomla a little more each time I play with it. Used to use WordPress more often but needed something that had a few more membership features.
May 30th, 2008 at 11:16 am
CMSs are really useful and get you so much credit as they do all the really hard work in getting a site set up. Used one of the originals PHPNUKE, then POSTNUKE, DRUPAL and tried various others. The really key thing is to get yourself organisaed at the start so that you can plan the structure of the site - especially with ones such as DRUPAL.
May 30th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I really love the versatility and power of Expression Engine.
May 30th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
[...] Content Management Systems [...]
May 30th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I hated Joomla. It was hard to use and they updated it so often it kept blowing my templates out of the water. Hated it, hated it, hated it.
May 30th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Expression Engine is a powerful system. It is not free (other than for a personal site) but it is affordable.
May 30th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
I loved playing around with Joomla, and would love to change my entire site over to it, except for one thing: my site gets first pages on many google searches. It is many hundreds of pages, and I have not found a way to change an existing site to Joomla, while keeping the URLs intact.
May 30th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Brian - you might try posting that question on the Joomla.org forums. I know there’s some ways to keep your SEO (or make it better) by switching over to Joomla, but I can definitely understand the fear in wanting to switch. Also, maybe talk to some web developers to see if someone can do it for you - check http://www.getafreelancer.com as I’m sure someone there can do it for cheap
May 30th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
awesome resources. I too am a Joomla fanatic but also use WordPress
May 30th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Brian, Tiara’s suggestion to check out the joomla.org forums is a good one. Joomla allows you to incorporate static pages into your CMS site. Go to the content management menu and you will see the static content item there. No point making the web server do extra work and take more time to produce a page that isn’t likely to change or need editing. As time goes by, you can migrate more and more of your static content to the CMS as you see fit. Good luck!
May 30th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
I was sorry to see that MODx was not on the list. MODx recently won the Packt Most Promising New Open Source CMS award (http://modxcms.com/modx-the-most-promising-open-source-content-management-system.html). While not as useful out-of-the-box as Joomla or WordPress, it surpasses them by quite a bit in power and flexibility.
http://modxcms.com
May 30th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Where are all the other cms - s
May 30th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I use wordpress as a CMS for our civic association. It was extremely easy for me to set up and configure the tech intensive stuff (forms, plugins, RSS feeds), but the thing I love is that its easy for people who aren’t so tech savvy to add their content, and so it has become a community effort. Also, with a few overriding CSS rules, I am able to make sure other people’s edits don’t break the design - shrink images to the width of the page, make fonts similar, blockquotes all the same, etc.
May 31st, 2008 at 12:06 am
I am a web designer and I highly recommend Joomla! and DotNekNuke CMS systems. I will no longer create an HTML site unless it is on a CMS platform. I find that most of my clients need to change their website on a regular basis (at least every 6 months). By creating a site on this platform, it makes it easy for me to add and remove pages and I can allow the client to make small adjustments themselves, just be logging into the site. For sites that are10 pages or more a CMS platform is a necessity, for smaller sites it leaves lots of room for growth. Both Joomla and DNN have friendly easy to use interfaces for my clients to log in and edit their site contents themselves.
For a web designer, Joonmla and DNN both take time to learn how to create templates on, but once you get over that learning curve you will quickly see the advantages. When a client returns 6 months later with new pages and major changes to the navigation system, you can say, no problem! instead of cringing at how much work it is to change even one button. New pages can be added to these sites and navigation systems can be entirely re-organized with ease. Not only that, a site set up on a CMS system can easily have an online store (virtuemart) , a newsletter signup , a classified section, or a forum added to it with relative ease down the road as the website grows.
For web designers I highly recommend learning a CMS platform and offering it to your clients. For individuals looking to create a site, consider purchasing a Joomla template, you will be able to spend your energy deciding where to put content instead of learning HTML.
Here are some CMS sites I have created:
DNN
http://www.annemurraycentre.com
http://www.aliveholistichealth.ca
http://www.lovesewing.com
Joomla
http://www.ipoassociation.com
http://www.vpconditioning.com
http://www.applehillspharmacy.com
May 31st, 2008 at 12:14 am
To answer Brian Foley’s question about SEO. I have transferred am HTML site over to a CMS system successfully and kept all of the Google rankings. the original site had.
The site http://www.lovesewing.com was receiving high rankings (#1 to #3 spot consistently) and has kept all of these rankings after the site transfer.
Joomla and DotNetNuke (this site is on) allow a web designer to create individual meta tags for each page. Outside of that a page created dynamically in a CMS system is read exactly the same as a static HTML page.
I highly recommend to Brian to upgrade to a CMS system.
Another note: the site http://www.aliveholistichealth.ca was originally a 100% Flash site, which I was hired to transform into a HTML site. I Used DNN CMS and their Google ranking have increased dramatically.
James
http://www.alavri.com
May 31st, 2008 at 2:55 am
I think Drupal is the best system, did an evaluation when we selected CMS for our sites. More information about Drupal can be found at http://drupal.org/.
May 31st, 2008 at 2:58 am
Nothing compares to Drupal
May 31st, 2008 at 5:47 am
I pretty much played around with all of the packages offered. After narrowing the list down to Joomla! and WordPress, decided to use only the latter with my current page. I selected Wordpress for what it added to the overall depth of the site, while keeping it relatively easy for me to manage. I didn’t select Joomla! for the overall site framework as it had limitations that negatively impacted the manner in which my site could grow. That said, it is rich with features that in most instances would be most useful in simplifying the management of ones site. So take around it around the block a few times!
May 31st, 2008 at 6:20 am
yea for a newbie like me, joomla = huh?
May 31st, 2008 at 6:25 am
CMSs do help alot, even if you are savvy with code, i which case you can really modify the templates, modules and such. However, there is one CMS I am amazed that you didn’t add to this list, it is easy to use, powerful, very easy to modify, has an extensive list of add-ons, and can produce professional websites with ease, it is, WebsiteBaker and can be found at http://websitebaker.org .
May 31st, 2008 at 9:37 am
If you want a reliable, versatile and free CMS, Drupal is the choice I recommend. I have set up a dozen Drupal sites for the last two years and so far, it has given me no reasons to look for another CMS application, so I’ve sticked to it. Especially in Lunar Pages accounts it is very easy to install and run a Drupal website.
May 31st, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Which platform does the best job at handling static content? I’m thinking of migrating my whole site to a CMS, but I don’t have a lot of time to spend on making the change. Currently using Nucleus for its multiple blog capabilities.
June 1st, 2008 at 5:21 am
Joomla is NOT web standards compliant and as such completely uninteresting for me. Just looking at the code coming out of Joomla makes me shudder. Brrrrr…. If you at all care about web standards and accessibility then Joomla is a terrible choice. Joomla is sooooo last century…
Drupal is an excellent choice, as mentioned above, with it’s large community and tons of modules available. Drupal is extremely powerful but it might be an overkill for some people, who has no need for all the goodies that Drupal has to offer.
I suggest that you first try to determine what you actually need your CMS to do. Both at present but also features and function you might need in the future. Armed with this info, it’s time to start looking at the alternatives and believe me, there are many, many alternatives out there.
The CMS Matrix (http://www.cmsmatrix.org/) is a great resource to compare alternatives.
For those of you who are looking for an extremely easy (although very limited in function) to use CMS, you might want to check out CushyCMS (http://www.cushycms.com/).
June 1st, 2008 at 9:18 am
For those lucky enough to use a Mac there is a truly EASY “personal” CMS called RapidWeaver. This slick, beautiful little web package combines the features of a CMS with the ease-of-use of a next generation interface. The templates easily equal or surpass those found in Joomla or similar CMSs. The cost is extraordinarily low: $59 for the app (which includes a handful of built in page-types like a blog, photo gallery, movie page, and basic text/photo, plus automated navigation (!), and a couple dozen themes. Additional plug-ins that provide slick little applets (including an ecommerce plugin for PayPal) are typically about $10-$20 each. For less than $100 you can have a tool set that delivers very professional sites rivaling what Dreamweaver or Joomla type apps can do.
And the kicker? It’s drop-dead easy, no coding required. But if you are comfortable with fiddling with HTML/CSS, then RapidWeaver allows you to customize “under the hood” quite easily. The only major limitation is that it’s “personal” and not “enterprise,” which means it doesn’t generally support 3rd party connections for editing. But it does support limited external editing through a couple of plug-ins. Still, for prototyping and for clients who only want occasional updates, RapidWeaver is well worth investigating. It’s the best kept secret on the Mac platform.
Check it out! http://www.realmacsoftware.com
It’s worth buying a Mac for, IMHO.
June 1st, 2008 at 9:25 am
Content Management Systems have some fundamental advantages over bloggers like WordPress, with features greater and more powerful user controls, document management and other functions.
I have Joomla! site on LunarPages, but use Zope/Plone a Python based CMS for more powerful portals,
which bloggers certainly cannot do and is difficult in Joomla.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
http://www.silverstripe.com/ is a new kid on the block, but it’s got potential
June 21st, 2008 at 9:09 am
I am looking at CMS systems, for some volunteer sites I do.
I am a professional standards and 508 webdesigner/developer I build my own stylesheets. Drupal looked overwhelming, but I didn’t try it out.
Any recommendations?
August 28th, 2008 at 9:23 am
I use Drupal. Since lunarpages doesn’t include it in the cpanel, I added it myself. Nothing beats it. It’s fast, simple, powerful, and ultimately configurable.
I have built large commercial services on top of Drupal, and now I’m using it to publish a NATIONAL dive magazine.
There is a dating service in development that I’m working on which uses 100% drupal. It rocks. I wish everything worked this well in the software world.
~D