Most people when they call me have no idea what I mean when I tell them about content management systems. They only want toe be able to edit their website. CMS is he industry acronym for a content management system and there are many many CMS in existence. I recall 3 years sitting in a coffee shop in Auckland (name dropper) and hearing three people behind me wither on about Drupal versus WordPress for their website design. The drivel they were coming out with even tired me and it mostly comprised of them rambling on using technical phrases to show how clever they were.
Most of my clients and you probably used to using Microsoft Word and feel that they should be able to jump in and edit a website like they edit a Word document. This of course is not always the case and there really is no such thing as a perfect system for editing your website that will allow you do all the things that you want to do with a website.
However there are plenty of systems that will bring you nearly there and allow you do a lot of the editing that you wish to do. However there are as many that don’t do this but this is because they sacrifice interface for beneath the hood power of functionality.
The CMS Matrix does a comparison of over 1200 different content management systems and if you browse through their comparison criteria you will see that it uses a wide base of technical strands for its comparison. To save you time my advise is don’t worry too much about it as for 99% of people their needs will be satisfied by the big 4-5 of WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine. There are some fine other CMS available like SMarty CMS which I have used and liked for its simplicity.
Look at the Top 10 CMS Systems from the DotNetNuke guys for some more comparisons. It is a fascinating area and many of the systems even outside the top ten have some killer features that the top 5 or 10 don’t have. Its finding the time to look at them. And even then once these guys come out with some feature you can be sure the top CMS are working on their next release to come out with this feature.
