Which CMS is best?

Today the web is all about content and sharing. The social web is alive and well and isn’t going anywhere. Because of this, it is more important than ever that businesses respond to the market quickly, address their customer’s questions and provide new content that will appeal to both search engines and potential customers searching for information on your product or industry.

A CMS or Content Management System is the best way to address these demands and save you money.  Because a CMS can give the average person the ability to update content such as text, photos, video and even product categories, a CMS is ideal.  But which CMS is best?

Drupal

This is a difficult question to answer because there are sooooo many choices.  There are many good platforms and everybody has their opinion.  Here’s the truth: The leading CMS platforms are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.  While there are many other decent platforms, these are generally proprietary, have limited plug-in options and, if the web developer you choose is not available down the road, or doesn’t deliver, you’ll have a lot of trouble finding someone who is truly comfortable working on these platforms.  Having said that, from here we’ll assume you’ll choose one of the big three CMS platforms.

Joomla

First of all, there is the question of potential.  Some developers will tell you that “WordPress can do things that Joomla cannot” or “Drupal is more robust than WordPress.” These claims are simply false.  All three platforms are written in .php (a highly clean & efficient script specifically designed for the web).  All three platforms cater to HTML/CSS language.  The capabilities and limitations of each platform and determined by the developer himself.

Think of it this way, there are a lot of people who can speak English, but not everyone communicates well.  When it comes down to it, being able to write and manipulate code, regardless of the platform, is the determining factor for the potential of any CMS platform.

Plugins: Plugins are to CMS what APPS are to Smart Phones. They allow your site to do things it couldn’t do before, without requiring each individual developer to spend hours creating the code from scratch.  The questions are:

Which platform has the most plug-ins?

Which platform has the most reliable plug-ins?

Wordpress

Sticking with our analogy above, WordPress CMS is iPhone of the CMS industry.  First of all, there are more users on the WordPress platform than any other…a lot more.  Gauging from the top 1,000,000 sites, Drupal holds 8.84% of this sites.  Joomla touts over 23 Million downloads since 2007, but only powers 11.92% of the top million sites.  Where does WordPress stand in all this? According to BuiltWith.com, WordPress is the foundation for of 61% of the top million sites–that’s 616,100 websites!

Along with this user base, comes the highest number and most reliable plug-ins.  There are currently 16,831 WordPress plugins. What does this mean for you as the user?

1) You have access to nearly 17,000 upgrades to the basic WordPress platform.  Some of these are easy to install, some of them are “plug & play” and others take some of them are more complicated to install and take some tweaking to make them interact properly with your site.  Working with a professional WordPress developer, you’ll have access to their knowledge of the WordPress plugin directory, which plugins work best and their ability to fine tune the plugins to remove any issues.

2) Another advantage of WordPress plugins is the largest test group on the planet.  With so many websites and users out there, issues with any given plugin rise to the surface faster, get reported and fixed or, get poorly rated so you know to stay away from them.

So, here’s the highlights:

1. The most popular CMS platforms are Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.
2. WordPress powers about 3x the number of websites compared to Joomla and Drupal combined.
3. Because of the number of users, WordPress features the most plugins with the most thorough testing

In our next post, we’ll discuss usability and give you a quick tour of the WordPress dashboard.

1 Comment

1. I really liked your blog, quite informative.. Thanks for sharing.

   CMS development India
   November 2, 2011 at 6:48 am