Gauson

A while back, I had published an article “Which CMS is the best?” writing on the different functionalities of which CMS to choose: Drupal or Joomla. In the Open Source CMS Award over the years, Drupal and Joomla have always been featured in the top three positions of Best Open Source PHP CMS category. This year, Drupal was awarded 1^st prize in this category with Joomla being 2^nd runner-up just behind Wordpress.

It may or may not come as a surprise to many that Wordpress has earned the top prize by winning the Overall Best Open Source SMS Award this year. Furthermore it is the first time in the past four years that Wordpress has won the award, securing a place for them in the Hall of Fame category for the award in 2010. This is an incredible achievement for Wordpress as it is now recognized as a full-featured CMS and not just a blogging platform in the market which signifies that it has become a great success amongst users and developers over the past year.

Other categories in the CMS Award included Most Promising Open Source CMS and Best Other Open Source PHP CMS. ImpressCMS won top spot for Most Promising Open Source CMS while Pligg and Pixie shared a tie for 1st runner-up position. Last but not least, winner of the Best Other Open Source PHP CMS was Plone followed by dotCMS and mojoPortal.

Congratulations to all the winners of this year’s CMS Award!!

There are a large number of open source content management systems available to enable you to create and manage your website effortlessly. All of them offer different functionalities and tools for easy use. The two popular CMS I have chosen to cover here are Joomla and Drupal. They are free to download and use. Each CMS has their own pros and cons and it really depends on what type of website you are creating and how experienced you are.

Let’s start with Joomla first.

Joomla is designed to work well in shared hosting packages. The look of Joomla’s installer looks much the same like the installers used for common desktop software, as well as the administrative interface that content editors use. There are a small number of entry barriers when using Joomla and it should take little time for website developers to get familiar with the system. If you need extensions to cater for your website and that are not available at extensions.joomla.org, it would not be too expensive for you to get a programmer to design one for you as Joomla is written in PHP, which is a widely recognized script language specifically designed for website development.
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