Blog / Content Management Systems (CMS)

What is content management?
A content management system (CMS) is a software package that allows you to publish a website using an online administrative interface with no technical training. Once the software is installed you simply log into the admin interface and start creating content for your website. The CMS generally has an easy to use text editor so you can add images and hyper-links to your content. Good CMS packages also have lots of add-on modules and templates so you can easily add functionality and change the look of your site.

If you want to create a website where the content is the most important part, a CMS will be your best bet. If your site is going to be small or a simple blog, using one of the blog CMS system will be your best choice. But if you want a full featuered website where many users are publishing content, you’ll want to use a full CMS.

There are literally hundreds of software packages out there for setting up content driven websites. This can make deciding which package is right for you quite difficult. Right now the most used CMS packages are Mambo, Joomla (a Mambo fork), and Drupal.

To learn more about Mambo please visit their website: http://www.mamboserver.com/
To learn more about Joomla please visit their website: http://www.joomla.com/
To learn more about Drupal please visit their website: http://www.drupal.org/

In addition, over the years blogging packages have become so sophisticated that they now offer much of the same functionality as full CMS packages do. Once installed blogging software allows the site owner to publish content and control the look and feel of the entire website through an online administrative interface. The two most popular blogging software packages are WordPress and Textpattern.

To learn more about Textpattern please visit their website: http://www.textpattern.com/
To learn moare about WordPress please visit their website: http://wordpress.org/

In addition, if content is the main focus of your website but you will also want to sell a few items, these CMS packages have e-commerce modules that can be installed later.

Bottom Line:
All five of the software packages listed on this page are free and open source. To try and decide which one is best would be unfair to them all. They’re all good packages. And some of it is going to boil down to personal preference. If you’ve used one of them before or have a friend who uses one of them you might want to consider using that package since you’ll either already know something about how it works or know someone who knows how it works. This can be a big advantage because all of these packages are very powerful, and with that power comes a certain amount of learning the specific system and how it operates.

Like all open source packages, the real strength lies in the community that supports it.
It seems like Mambo has stumbled a little bit lately, as Joomla is simply a fork of that package, which occurred when some of the Mambo developers became disillusioned with the direction Mambo was taking. So it remains to be seen if Mambo will recover. In addition, since Joomla is just a fork of Mambo, it’s unclear how successful it will become in the coming years. As for blogging software, WordPress seems to be gaining a lot of momentum recently and is used far more than Textpattern. So if you want to create a simple content driven website or blog with lots of possibilities, Wallanet recommends WordPress. If you want to create a fuller content driven website where you’re going to have many users publishing content, Wallanet recommends Drupal, which is what we used to create Wallanet.com.

What else will you need to know before you launch your content driven website?
As mentioned above, all five of these content management systems are excellent and very powerful. While the basic install will give you lots of functionality, it won’t take long before you will want to start using the free add-on modules that are available. The very basic install is fairly generic. Typically for a good CMS system, like the ones mentioned here, adding a module or theme is not terribly difficult but it may require some additional development time.

Please see our FAQ page for more details about using the add-on modules.