Many newbie’s and other webmasters, who, like me, have survived on old schools methodologies are finding one term that makes a difference in their business models or work flows, what ever they might be. The term being - ‘CMS’ or also known as Content Management Systems. So if you are a wannabe webmaster, who would want to put up websites for a life and would like to have a “quick buck” turn around time, then Read on…

What is a Content Management System?

A Content Management System or CMS is piece of web software that is built on existent technologies and is used for putting up websites into production, within 3-7 days. There are plenty of Content management systems available online today. Each one catering to different needs and requirements where websites are concerned. Some are simple and easy to setup, some complex, some require a lot of knowhow to setup. But each one adhering to one philosophy, that being, they are solely designed to handle any and all type of content, or better term would be data. This includes Files, Articles, Images, mp3, wav other sound files, movies, flash; you name it.

So essentially, a Content Management System or CMS, allows a web developer to quickly publish blogs, websites, web apps, portals, social apps, etc quickly and almost effortlessly.

What’s the CMS fizz about?

As mentioned, all CMS’s are designed to handle content/data on the web front. So, this means that there is an management interface involved. What does this mean, is that you don’t need to know how to code. All you need to know is how to use! That’s it. With the installation of these CMS’s becoming easier and more automated day by day, it only makes sense to learn more.

So, how do you choose a CMS?

Again, as stated there are plenty of CMS’s available today. How do you choose which CMS would be best for you? To start with, A simple answer to this question is again a question. The question being – Would you want to spend on buying a CMS or would you want a free CMS solution? – Yes, there are two branches, one where you would have to buy it. Two where you downloand and use it for free. The free ones fall in the open source category and have a lot of support and community to offer.

From a personal point of view, I have never really felt the need to buy one. This is because of the simple fact that, there are plenty of wonderful open source CMS systems available that work for every need you might have. And because of the free availability of such CMSs, many of my friends earn an earnest quick buck today!

Some notable Content Management Systems

Joomla: By personal bias and usage, the best open source CMS out there. It is by far the best CMS system that I have seen and used and I strongly suggest, that when ever you use this, you may want to read more about it. Since it is vast, flexible, not very complex and its easy to setup. This ones based on PHP, MySQL and Apache and is free to use.

Wordpress: Again, This is by experience, my second favorite. But if you are a newbie in the web master world or the CMS world. I would suggest you start from here. Wordpress again is based on PHP, MySQL and Apache and is extremely simple to use and setup. If you have ever blogged, this would be a piece cake to use! It is scalable and flexible and most web developers use this one for setting up, yes you guessed it right, blogs.

Frog CMS: Surprisingly, this is the lighter version of Wordpress and is extremely simple. Definitely for new comers into the CMS world.

Silver Stripe: A powerful Content Management system, which is both scalable and flexible. Silver Stripe is again open source and based on PHP, MySQL and Apache. Use this one if you want to build powerful, scalable websites fast!

MoinMoin: A Content Management System, based around the idea of WikiPedia or a wiki. This again is an opensource solution and requires PHP, MySQL and Apache. If you are planning to setup a wiki, I would recommend MoinMoin.

Radiant: Radiant is a no frill open source content management system. Some of its notable features include, a nice user interface, flexible integration with custom made CSS templates, custom tagging engine, state of the art plugin-modding infrastructure. Radiant is based on Ruby On Rails or ROR.

CMS made simple: CMS made Simple is a content management system which is for the advanced webmaster. If you know what you are doing and know something in PHP and MySQL and would like to deploy ajax based, complex websites fast. CMS Made Simple is the right candidate for you. It has a vast community that supports you and it is extensible and flexible.

Community Server: Community Server is based on Microsoft’s .net platform. This is a “heavy duty” or Enterprise level Content Management System or as they like to call it Enterprise level Social Platform, and it requires a Windows based server with MSSQL. There are two versions, a community version, which is available for free download but has limited features. The other being a fee based system, which entitles you to support and some extra features. If you are Microsoft aficionado and would like to buy a CMS, this should be your first choice.

LifeRay: A leading Content Management System, which is free and provides for an excellent deployment tool and features where enterprise level portals are concerned. Flexible, Scalable and magnificent for deploying portals. Based on the corporate ideology, this system runs on Java.

MODx CMS: This was suggested by a reader, and this has got an award, personally, havent tried it, but all in all is pretty powerful, Supports w3c standards, has SEO as a built in feature, it even has its own CSS menu builder which you can tweak, since its open source. I will try this one out, sounds promising and is pretty fresh. Thanks Shawn!

Others, more heard of Content Management Systems include Typo3, PhpNuke, Mambo, Drupal, Geeklog, etc.

Next Stop.. CMS Central

Next step and a conclusion of this article would be, asking you guys to start with CMS, start small, learn and then decide what suits you guys the best. There are plenty of more CMSs available, have a look at the resources below to get an entire list. Comments are always welcome, do drop in say if this article was informative and if you would require more info. We would certainly would like to help.

CMS Resources

Joomla@ http://www.joomla.com/
Wordpress@ http://www.wordpress.org/
Frog CMS@ http://www.madebyfrog.com/
Silver Stripe@ http://www.silverstripe.com/
MoinMoin@ http://moinmo.in/
Radiant@ http://www.radiantcms.org/
CMS Made Simple@ http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/
Community Server@ http://www.communityserver.com/
LifeRay@ http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/home
List of all CMSs@ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems