Modern pace of life and business leaves its mark on all means both receiving and providing information. The only matter is how fast and complete information can be found. On all of this depends success of a business.

The Internet has given the world the rich opportunities for providing information. But the cornerstone of the present moment is the speed and ease of information processing and how quickly and correctly can your business provide up to date information on the Internet. Modern technology of creating and maintaining websites offers developers, managers and site users a huge selection of ready-to-use systems. Most content management systems (CMS) are universal, but many have their main purpose, its pros and cons.

“Selecting Content Management System (CMS). Why Do You Need One?”  provides useful information about CMS and will answer some of the questions that will help your business to make the right choice between CMS.

Why?

Why do you need a content management system? All instruments owe their existence to the human impulse to facilitate work and make it more efficient. No exception applies to the Internet technologies. Site creation and support process is quite time consuming and requires some knowledge of programming, design and marketing. Most modern CMSs allow people to have minimal skills to work with a personal computer and Internet knowledge to share their work through the site: add and update information on the site, take orders, analyze statistics, etc..  All the operations before the existance of the CMS demanded skilled labor. Specialists in design, graphics, programming, and marketing are now available to ordinary users. When using the CMS website within a few minutes you can add news article or edit product and services offering.

General features of content management systems (CMS)

Available Capacity. When using the CMS, a website has no need to install any special software, because the system itself is installed on the web server and all transactions are carried out on the content through any internet browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Google Chrome, etc. ).

The Completeness of the Functionality. Most CMS made ​​on the principle of modularity that has some basic base to which you can connect the modules. Modules may already be part of the complex system, and can be installed separately. Many systems allow independent development to develop and include the additional modules to a CMS. Thus the overall functionality of a website depends on the functions of the included modules.

Security. Most modern CMS provides a range of facilities for the safe operation of the site, information security and integrity of the site’s structure.

Overall structure. All CMS consists of a shell (program management ) and Databases. Shell is a set of programs that take the user’s request information from the database and pass it as a separate page to the browser. Most of the dynamic pages are generated “on the fly” in a predetermined pattern.

Criteria for choosing CMS

Site assignment. most important criterion for choosing a content management system (CMS) is a destination site.  If your site is geared primarily to the sale of goods or services (online stores, catalogs, etc) then this could be one type of CMS, with eCommerce functionality. If you have news or information portal then  it’s a different kind of system. If you are planning a large company’s intranet or portal then it will need a corporate system. And so on,  it all depends on the direction and purpose of the website. The only type of sites that use CMS is not so justified is for the sites with it 1-3 pages, business cards (About Us, Contact), or some informational sites.

Funcionality. Once you have decided on the appointment of the site, there will be a list of functions that the system should provide: accommodation of the information materials (news, articles, terms and concepts, questions and answers, and so.), placing product offerings, services list (catalog), order forms and applications, feedback, support, communication and etc.. All these specific tasks provide basic  functionality of the site. Therefore, when choosing a CMS you should pay careful attention to its functionality.

Comfort. Next, you must determine who, where and how often will work with the content of a site. You need to consider publisher’s computer skills. The CMS should provide a comfortable text editors to the site administrators, owners, and authors. And if it is in the scope of the site that a team of authors will be involved in updating and adding the content, then CMS should provide ample opportunity for teamwork.

Technical requirements for hosting. Since the CMS is installed on the server (web hosting platform) then all CMS already has a number of technical requirements for the server, where it will operate. CMS requires different types of databases, programming languages ​​support, available disk space, and other similar features. If you already have a hosting platform, when choosing CMS you should pay attention to the technical ability to use this CMS on your site. Particularly complex, multipurpose CMS or projects with a large attendance (news sites, large online retailers) can place a heavy load on the server.

Security. There are two types of software development: open source system (CMS source code is open for modification) and commercial systems closed-source (source CMS is the property of the developer and can not be modified). For the first type is characterized by the presence of a large number of different modules and more than a simple change in the functional site. These systems are supported by some developer community on a voluntary basis. For commercial (closed) systems are important better security and support. And certainly – for all types of CMS important updates and security fixes.

The Cost. There are paid and free content management systems. And even among commercial (private) CMS, there are free or shareware editions. Typically, these free options have almost all the necessary functionality for a small website (blog, online store, web site directory, etc). Advanced functionality is sometimes available for a purchase.

Support. It is important to determine who and how will deal with installation and maintenance of your CMS. Each CMS may have its own specialist company, or contract with the developer’s studio. The value to adding developer’s support provides the speed, confidence and high level of maintenance to your site. For systems with open source, it is important to have members in the community worthy of support channels, such as the official forums, mailing lists, wiki and knowledge base.

Ease of Deployment. An important factor is the ease of installation and the system’s upgrade. If you install and configure CMS by yourself it may require long work hours. In this case you must consider alternative options for who will be deploying your CMS project (webmaster, developers, or site administrators).

Conclusion

Cumulative comparison of all these factors and will give you an insight into what kind of CMS is most suited to you. In conclusion, you should have an understanding of the project’s cost, ease of use and maintenance. The total costs are generally considered as the cost of the product (or a license to use it), the cost of implementation of the product, the cost of support for minimum of 2 years and the expected costs of upgrading the site by the developers.

Popular CMS:

• 1C Bitrix
• UMI.CMS
• NetCat
• HostCMS
• Amiro CMS
• Datalife Engine
• Drupal
• Joomla
• WordPress
• Typo 3 and others

Joomla vs WordPress CMS

Remember of advantages and disadvantages of WordPress and Joomla:

• if you want members to access your videos on a subscription basis and have members in various levels of permission (depending on their subscription level), Joomla is your best bet.
• If you simply want to show your videos on your site, or you only have 1 type of members and you want things to be simple and clean, WordPress will do nicely.
• If you want to show off different types on videos on your home pages from different sections, more or less like a magazine, again Joomla is better equipped for it.
• If you want to create a video journal, WordPress makes life really easy for you.
• WordPress is very simple and easy platform and tasks are extremely easy to accomplish. You may want to go for WordPress, as it’s the best open source option to manage and update your website daily.
• Joomla is one of the most popular CMS’s on the market due to its power and flexibility. The Joomla package consists of many different parts, which allow modular extensions and integrations to be made easily. Joomla features numerous capabilities and a developed custom database work.
• One of the reasons why I choose Joomla:
  • Costs very little for maintenance and development
  • SEO and SEM optimized
  • Very flexible, intuitive and easy to use
  • Manage text, images, documents and media files
  • Unlimited possibilities of development of web pages
  • Has wide spread and support a strong and very active web community
• WordPress its really good at a blogging tool but Joomla, by comparison is a full blown CMS that can blog if you want it to easily.
• Joomla provides 100% perfect URLs and metadata when managed correctly, and pagecode that is good enough for the job.