Most Popular Open Source Content Management Systems

We all come across many websites while surfing the web. They all perform a certain pre-defined task say, some work as a simple web blog while some websites offer you an online shopping arcade. Whatever be the job, each one of them has to work on a certain platform that can manage the content on the server. To perform the above tasks we need a Special Content Management System.

Q. Now what is a Content Management System in practical?
A. Basically a Content Management System is a software that keeps track of every piece of content on your website. The term ‘Content’ means anything which is stored on the web server or which is transferred between a client & a server. It can be anything like a plain text, documents, photos, videos, a user database or just anything that is used while interacting on world wide web. Content management systems basically help the non technical users who can’t program an application but need a ready made solution that can handle every bit & piece of their application in both front as well as back end.

Nowadays, Open Source Content Management Systems are used by almost everyone ranging from a proficient programmer to the non technical groups & even the Fortune 500 companies. Their are quite a few reasons which contribute to such a tremendous popularity of Open Source CMS on a global scale such as the involvement of the world’s finest brains in the development of Open Source CMS, their regular updates, extensive testing & their free availability. Today we will be reviewing few of the most popular open source Content management systems which you can readily use to go online. Please note that it was not possible to review each & every feature of all the products. Hence any issues that may conflict your opinion with the views written here should be brought to our immediate notice for the betterment of us all.

Drupal : is a free Open Source Content Management System which came into limelight just after its initial release in year 2001 has since been growing as the most popular & the most downloaded open source content management system which is not only been used by individuals but is also been deployed by many top ranking web portals as their programming platform. Drupal allows to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Drupal maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers who remain focused on developing new addons & upgrading the product. Drupal is generally deployed in running the following type of web applications:

• Content Management Systems
• Blogs
• Collaborative authoring environments
• Forums
• Peer-to-peer networking
• Newsletters
• Podcasting
• Picture galleries
• File uploads and downloads

Sample Site

Joomla : The open source CMS Joomla emerged in September 2006 as a result of the continuation of the work of the Development Team which unanimously resigned from the Mambo project in August 2005. Though not as big as Drupal, still Joomla has recieved over 2.5 million downloads which are still growing because of the large accesibility of this open source CMS. Joomla can be deployed in building & mainting the following  types of web applications:

• Corporate Web sites or portals
• Corporate intranets and extranets
• Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
• E-commerce and online reservations
• Government applications
• Small business Web sites
• Non-profit and organizational Web sites
• Community-based portals
• School and church Web sites
• Personal or family homepages

DotNetNuke: The Open Source CMS DotNetNuke is the outcome of a “starter kit” issued by Microsoft which was initially called  IBuySpy Portal (IBS). It was released by Microsoft in Jan 2002 under EULA license, with full source code to demonstrate  how to implement specific functionality on the new ASP.NET 1.0 platform. However the script worked fine as it was intended, but it carried a limited set of features & functionality.
Microsoft hence invited the open source devolopment community to work on the Kit which later paved the way for the birth of “DotNetNuke” when, on Dec 24th 2002, Shaun Walker of Perpetual Motion Interactive Systems Inc. released a modified version of the original IBS portal application which included a variety of enhancements and innovations over the original IBS code, including the ability to support multiple portals from a single installation, a feature which became very popular in the shared web hosting market.

Plone: Started in 1999 by lan Runyan, Alexander Limi, and Vidar Andersen -  the plone project has quickly grown into one of the most popular open source content management systems after DotNetNuke, Drupal & Joomla. Plone is built on the foundations of the free Zope Application server. It is easy to set-up, extensible with multitude of addons, & is internationalized with the support of over 35 languages in Plone interface.
Plone is interoperable with most relational database systems, whether open source or commercial. It is even platform independent in a way that it can be run on a vast array of platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and BSD. It is currently being supported by a team of over 100 devolopers spread around the globe.
Sample Site

TypoLight: Developed by Leo Feyer in 2004, TypoLight is a great Ajax Based Open Source web content management system that specializes in accesibility (in both back end & front end) to enable it to be easily accesible to people with disabilities.
TypoLight smartly utilizes the Object Oriented Features of PHP 5 alongwith AJAX. It provides a Cross-Browser CSS framework & ensures a graceful fallback of AJAX in case JavaScript is disabled. The solid codebase of this AJAX-based CMS ensures its bright future. At present the TypoLight supports over 60 third party extensions & the list will is expected to rise in future.

CMS Made Simple: This open source CMS provides a fast & easy option to devolop a personalised website having few pages within no time. It is not so much feature rich like drupal,joomla & you can’t expect running a full fledged community forum over it. CMS MAde Simple provides a great flexibility in managing the design of your website(or homepage). It provides a very easy interface to add content & you can put the content & addons whereever you like.
Sample Site

Impress CMS: It is another open source CMS that solves multiple purposes & has something to offer to every kind of website whether it be a personal homepage, a web blog, an article management site or a community based portal requiring different levels of permissions for different user groups. It even provides an online store for selling things.

MiaCMS: MiaCMS is another outcome of the open source Mambo code base from version 4.5.3+ through 4.6.3, after Mambo development crew got split. The MiaCMS project, which is only about 5 months old is getting a lot of attention both from the user & devoloper community as well & we can see some major improvements in the coming months. Major features of MiaCMS include:

• Simple Installation
• Graphical Content Editors (automatic code generation)
• RSS Content Syndication
• Powerful/Extensible 3rd Party Extension System
• Flexible Site Theming Capabilities
• Free & Open Source (GPL v2 License)
• Site Search
• REST enabled
• User Management
• Multilingual
• Stable, Secure, and Mature

MemHT: is another PHP based Open Source CMS & blog management system that allows creation & management of websites in a few easy steps. It is completely customisable & expandable & comes with a rich set of attractive & eye-catchy templates.

SilverStripe: It is a very powerful yet simple(Intuitive & user friendly) PHP based open source Content Management System. It is fully XHTML compliant, cross platform & easy to install. This free Open Source CMS uses intelligently the latest & the greatest Web 2.0 techniques to make your website universally acceptable professional.
Main Features are:

• XHTML and accessibility compliance
• multiple ways of organising navigation through folksonomy
• a flexible data object model
• multiple templates per page
• separate “draft site” and “published site” through staging content
• asset management
• image resizing/cropping/rotating
• versioning and rollback
• friendly URLs with meta-data
• drop-and-drop sitemap reorganisation
• AJAX enabled
• OpenID, a web-based form builder
• free themes, modules, widgets & much more.

SilverStripe is released under the terms of the BSD Licence.
Sample Site

ezPublish: eZ Publish is an Open Source Content Management System that you build corporate websites, intranets, media portals & webshops. ezPublish currently comes in two versions. One is the Open source exPublish Content Management System that has been downloaded on more than 2.5 systems. Another version of ezPublish is the enterprise version i.e “eZ Publish Premium”. It comes with support, gaurantees & maintainance.
Sample Site

XOOPS: According to the XOOPS official website – “XOOPS is an extensible, OO (Object Oriented), easy to use dynamic web content management system written in PHP. XOOPS is the ideal tool for developing small to large dynamic community websites, intra company portals, corporate portals, weblogs and much more.”
The word XOOPS is an acronym of eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System. XOOPS is highly flexible. Yes we mean the word ‘highly’.

This open source CMS can be used as a web framework for small, medium as well as large sites. XOOPS is highly flexible in a way that its modules can be disabled/enabled according to the nature of use. It thus won’t put unnecessary burden on your resources for the things not required.  For example, a standard install with only the News module enabled will provide the functionality of a personal weblog or journal. Similarly, a community based interactive site can be made by enabling a set of modules like News, Forum, Download, Web Links while for a large enterprise level site we can devolop our own modules & integrate them into the XOOPS user management system.

Main Features

• Database-driven
• Fully Modularized
• Personalization
• User Management
• World Wide Support Teams
• Multi-byte Language Support
• Versatile Group Permissions System
• Theme-based skinnable interface(At present over 60 skinnable themes available for download)

Sample Site
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Tags: best cms, best open source cms, content management system, Drupal, Joomla, Open Source, open source cms, top cms