Open Source Blogging and Content Management Systems
The two most popular content management systems currently available are WordPress and Joomla. These are open source and free to download and use. New releases are frequent and should be used since the usually incorporate one or more security fixes. Obviously they both have their strengths and weaknesses and neither one of them does everything perfectly. However, if a website relies heavily on content as in a blog or a news website, WordPress is recommended. For more complex sites, we recommend Joomla or a custom CMS. Dupral, the third most popular CMS, is technically complex and undoubtedly a powerful content management system.
WordPress is a user friendly blogging software that can also be used to create and maintain a normal website. As with all CMS's, you can add, delete and edit posts or pages on a WordPress site without having to know how to use html. There are numerous templates and plugins available for WordPress, many of them free, which allow you to present a pretty much unique look for you website or blog. The code is standard and this makes it easy for Google to index. In addition, there are excellent SEO plugins - the best currently being the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin which can be downloaded free here. Because of its Google-friendly coding, from a marketing standpoint, WordPress is hard to better.
ammonet InfoTech provides a WordPress design and maintenance solution, and two examples of WordPress blogs that we maintain are given below. Contact us if you would like to set up a WordPress CMS blog or website.
Chianti Travel Guide running on the Wordpress content management system
Greve in Chianti Tuscany Blog running on the Wordpress content management system
Chianti Info running on the Wordpress content management system
Joomla is undoubtedly a less easy CMS to use in comparison with WordPress. On the other hand it has many features that WordPress lacks, so that a Joomla expert can set up, for example, a community or a network with a membership area, newsroom, forums, articles, input from external authors etc. or a major ecommerce website Creating a navigation structure is easy, once you understand how it works and, like WordPress, it doesn’t require knowledge of html. Adapting the look is also simple if you are satisfied with changing some colours and the logo. However, beyond that, Joomla has a complicated structure so that it's better to get an expert to set up your site and then leave it unchanged until you want to carry out a major makeover. Joomla is used more often for professional corporate sites and, when done properly, probably looks more professional than a WordPress website.
Note that for ecommerce we recommend and are expert in the use of the Magento platform.
Drupal Content Management System
Drupal is a powerful, developer-friendly tool for building complex sites. Like most powerful tools, it requires expertise and experience to operate. Drupal seems to have the highest adherence to database theory and SQL which makes it optimal for database developers. It's a very generalised tool which can make it difficult for beginners who have a very speciic task in hand. In particular, Drupal uses a very specific and difficult to learn technical vocabulary which is virtually incomprensible to a novice. However, once you've learned how it works, Drupal allows development of very complex websites that are efficient and secure.
Drupal does tend to consume server CPU resources but this is easily dealt with by using the Varnish http accelerator.
