You are an organization, seeking to build a site that any of your non-tech savvy employees can update regularly. You want a quick turn around – it has to be up and running fairly quickly. Oh, and you don’t have much of a budget. So, after Googling about, you find out that you’ll want an open source Content Management System. Excellent! Problem solved!

Wait, what is it?

I like to explain what a Content Management System does by comparing it to what we’re all used to: MS Word. You open up a document and type. You can add pictures, tables and formatting. You can save documents anywhere on your computer. You can send documents to others to edit.

A typical Content Management System allows you to update content without knowing HTML. It allows you to post the content up to your site without having an FTP client. Your employees can take that content (depending on their user permissions) and edit it. You can tell where you want the content to be displayed: on the home page, on part of the home page, on its own page etc.

And, there are many free CMSs to choose from: the big three I’ve had experience with are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!.

Great! Now, get one and go do it.

Not so fast! Content Management Systems can be a big headache. They may not always do what you want and they all have a learning curve. There is no perfect CMS. Each one has its own strengths and its weaknesses. Below, I highlight what each system is the best and worst at.

WordPress

Best: First and foremost, it is a blogging platform. You write an article, and it gets added to the front page of other articles and sorted in reverse chronological. You can tag and categorize articles. Finally, WordPress allows (and encourages) comments on your articles.

Worst: It was made to be a blogging system so making it act like something else, say, an e-commerce site isn’t its best use. Though it is possible, with the proper plugins, it will take a lot more time to develop.

Joomla!

Best: Joomla! is perfect for setting up a company site. You write the article, and tell Joomla! where to show it. This is a good system if you want your employees to make quick updates in the “news” section, but have every other part of the site remaining static.

Worst: The backend (where you log in) has quite a bit of a learning curve. So you’ll find that you’ll spend an hour or two getting to know how it works. Also, it is not a community-based system like WordPress. It is meant for you to post stuff up quickly in order to update your visitors.

Drupal

Best: Amazing community building system. Use this if you:

• have a lot of employees that want to blog
• if you have some news sections that need to be updated frequently
• if you’re a school portal and you need your students to log in for whatever reason etc etc

Worst: Though it is the most customizable system, it takes the most time to develop. You may even need to hire a dedicated PHP developer to get your site up and going. Its backend system, by far, has the steepest learning curve. What took you a couple of hours to learn Joomla!, will take you days to learn Drupal’s backend.