Guide to selecting a Content Management System

Hi there, today we are going to explore few thing on Content Management System (CMS). First of all we need to know what CMS is. And the answer is: CMS is a user friendly framework to easily maintain your web contents using a database as backend. CMS helps you maintain webpages text media files images etc. for your website. It helps you easily update existing contents and add new contents easily.

These days Content Management System is very popular for developing websites and that’s the power of CMS, you can easily publish online magazines, e-newspapers, websites of any size, Shopping cart website and of course your blog. But selecting a right CMS is not quite easy, it needs some workaround and a clear vision on what you want to achieve develop and how big will be its audience.

There are lots of Content Management Systems available to use, most of them are open source and can be used on both Linux and windows platform using PHP and .Net technology. CMS based on PHP can be configured on Linus as well as on Windows Platform, but CMS using .Net technology can be used only on Windows platform. Every CMS has lots of common and few advanced features in it. You need to check all features of CMS before selecting it to start development. Because changing CMS at later stage is not quite easy for everyone.

If you are planning for your blog without any investment, you can still use most popular like, wordpress.com or blogger.com. They both are free and are quite easy to configure as everything is already in please to start with. There are few configuration changes which you cannot make in these platforms because you don't have full controls of these websites. Alternatively you can easy start your own blog with a very small investment, CMS you can use Wordpress, B2Evolution, PHPNuke etc for setting you your blog. If you plan to develop a website then anyone from Wordpress, B2Evolution, PHPNuke, Joomla, Drupal are few popular to select from, but you should check out features before starting up.

As a beginner Wordpress is quite easy to setup because of its structure, Joomla can be used for some advanced configuration, and others can be tried by exploring their features. At last there are few consideration before selecting CMS for startup, these are

•    Does CMS allow you to create static web pages?

•    Does CMS take care of SEO requirements?

•    Does it allow you to save multiple versions of the same document?

•    How steep is the learning curve?

•    How it is configurable?

•    Can it be hosted under your own domain?

•    What type of support is available in case someone needs it?

It doesn’t matter what CMS, I think no one has right to say that because everyone's learning style is different. There are lots of CMS available to download, and has different style and structure. So better try yourself by exploring it. GOOD LUCK!

Last Words: Selecting a CMS is quite tricky, first prepare your mind for what you want to achieve, explore features of different CMS, select the close enough and start customization.