What is Content Management System?

A content management system or CMS is a software application that is used for creating and managing the digital content. The CMS tools are often used for enterprise content management (ECM) and web content management (WCM).

• An Enterprise Content Management is responsible for facilitating collaboration in the workplace by integrating document management, digital asset management, and records the retention functionalities, providing the end-users with a role- bases access to the digital assets of the organization.
• Web Content Management is responsible for facilitating the collaborative authoring needed for the websites. An ECM software usually includes a WCM publishing functionality, but the ECM webpages remain behind the organization’s firewall.

Enterprise Content Management and Web Content Management have two components- a Content Management Application (CMA) and a Content Delivery Application (CDA).

• The Content Management Application is a graphic user interface that allows the user to control the creation, modification, and removal of content from the website, without having any prior knowledge of HTML.
• The Component Delivery Application is responsible for providing the back-end services which support the management and delivery of the content after it has been created in the CMA.

Features of Content Management System

Following can be some of the essential features of any content management system tool-

#1 High Performance and Scalability

Caching is one of those key attributes which can improve the performance of a website. The CMS used must offer multiple levels of caching and each of these levels should be easily customizable

#2 Extensibility and Integration

The CMS chosen should easily integrate with other technologies and platforms such as different CRM systems, ERPs, Social Networks. The ready-to-use connectors for most of the platform remain positive, thus decreasing the development costs significantly

#3 Advanced Security Management

With an increased number of content providers for any website, advanced security management is needed, this can be achieved by fully customizable content permissions, module permissions along with user roles. Mature CMSs should provide multiple prebuilt authentication options

#4 Mobile Devices Support

Whether the Web design is mobile-responsive or a separate mobile website, the CMS should be able to support both of these approaches. Flexible CMS should hold different mobile websites or applications

Creating a Website Using CMS

CMSs are open source software and free to use. In order to create a new website on these platforms, one needs to have a domain name and a web hosting provider. This setup is known as self-hosted and the key advantage of using a self-hosted content management system is that one has full control over design and functionalities.

• Domain Name

Once the right CMS is selected for a website, one needs to have a domain name. When a domain name is to be chosen, one needs to choose the intended name from a top-level dot domain such as- .com, .org, .net, etc.

• Web Hosting Provider

Once the domain name is chosen, the selection of a reliable web hosting service is important. To a large extent, the functionality and performance of the website depend on the hosting provider. The host ensures that the site is available to potential readers and also is the place where the files are stored online. A wrong web host can bring in problems to the website and a web host holds a key role in maintaining a successful website on the Internet.

Open-Source CMS Software

Migration from one CMS to another needs a lot of time, knowledge as well as efforts. Thus, it becomes quite essential to choose the right content management system for the website model and business.

The top-3 rich open source CMS software includes-

WordPress

WordPress has more of a blogging component than the CMS component. However, because of more than 17,000 plugins, WordPress has emerged as a CMS-like software. Its script is an open source and it is free to use for any project, making it multi-faceted and a highly customizable platform. WordPress is mostly used for small and mid-sized websites and blogs. Despite being a complex system, it holds a fast learning curve for those who don’t have any advanced technical skill-set. By using free and paid templates or themes, the look of a website can be customized on the go

Joomla

In complexity terms, Joomla is a bit more complex than WordPress and less comprehensive and advanced than Drupal. Joomla is an open-source platform, which holds more than 3% of the web that runs on it. It is extremely rich in terms of features and supports all the features needed for a modern website. It can be used for creating any website, but it is predominantly used by small and mid-tier eCommerce sites. Joomla ranks high amongst the easy-to-use content management systems. Users are provided with abundant resource including programmer’s tools and tutorials to start their website on Joomla. Due to Joomla’s comprehensive navigation system, users can manage hierarchies successfully

Drupal

Drupal is one of the most comprehensive open-source CMS that is available, which can outrank WordPress and Joomla in terms of complexity. Drupal is an enterprise-class CMS, which allows the developers to readily integrate it with SAP and other similar applications. It is often viewed as a content management framework (CMF) instead of a CMS. A Content Management Framework or CMF doesn’t make any assumptions in terms of how the content of a website should be managed. It is a great platform for creating tailor-made eCommerce websites or any other large where power, scalability, and stability are the most significant components.

The Drupal CMS emphasizes on functionalities in all the aspects of website management, especially with user management, graphic content management, page content management, etc. Drupal also helps in facilitating the creation of websites that are feature-rich, SEO-friendly as well as mobile-ready. It also allows the companies to deploy the core features quickly leaving the customization part for the later stages. Thus, Drupal is a platform which allows better dynamics in terms of customization, i.e. Drupal websites respond better according to the changing business requirements and customer feedbacks

Pros and Cons of Open-Source Software Tools

Market Analysis of CMS Tools

WordPress

Today, there are nearly 18 million websites worldwide which use WordPress as their CMS. WordPress holds a market share of 60% in the CMS market and by introducing woo-commerce, WordPress now holds a market share of 10% in the e-commerce market. Originally it was considered as a blogging platform, but now it has become the leading CMS provider, due to the development of extensions that makes it fully customizable to a fully functional CMS tool.

Joomla

Joomla has the second largest market share in the CMS segment with 2.5 million worldwide installations. Joomla is a more comprehensive CMS than WordPress having functionalities that don’t require extensions.  This CMS platform is better geared towards IT or developers with the knowledge of building a website.