The Top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems
As a web designer working online since Netscape 1.0 building sites for clients, the biggest change I’ve seen in thirteen years in the industry is the advent of the Open Source Content Management System as the preferred platform for development. Nothing is more illustrative of the change between first generation web standards and the web 2.0 evolution than the CMS trend. Providing a great base for social networking, including blogs, forums, wikis, image galleries, comment logs, ecommerce, voting, bookmarking, tags, and innumerable other extensions along with traditional web publishing methods, the CMS is the preferred platform for most web designers building sites today. Open Source has led to the establishment of huge, user-powered development communities that are dynamically changing and constantly upgrading, offering free software, themes, and modules for building professional web sites. The ubiquity of the shared hosting LAMP – Cpanel – Fantastico set up has popularized the CMS far beyond even the developer/design community.
The top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems:
1. Drupal
2. WordPress
3. Joomla
4. Media Wiki
5. Liferay
6. TYPO3
7. Moodle
8. Dolphin
9. Pligg
10. Movable Type
Honorable Mention:
Xoops, Geeklog, e107, Mambo, Nucleus
1. Drupal:
Drupal gets the top nod because of its ease of use, vast number of modules, great user, developer, and support community.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: core CMS, Views, CCK, Organic Groups, & huge library of contributed modules.
Disadvantages: complex, needs more top quality themes, frequent security upgrades.
Outlook: Huge potential to continue growth and expansion on this platform over time.
Website: http://www.drupal.org/
2. WordPress:
WordPress is a simple and elegant CMS, perfect for single user blogs, with a large number of themes and modules available online.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Easiest CMS to use, customize, and extend.
Disadvantages: Lacks many of the social networking functions, ecommerce, forums, wikis, etc. used on more expansive sites.
Outlook: Best for personal publishing, huge user community, will continue to be the preferred choice of bloggers for years.
Website: http://www.wordpress.org/
3. Joomla:
Joomla has one of the largest user communities of any CMS, everything you need and more to develop social networks, ecommerce, & archive sites.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Professional standards, internationalization, customization.
Disadvantages: too many commercial products for Open Source development, difficult to learn.
Outlook: Strong challenger for the top CMS spot, commercialization of extensions should continue to provide many income opportunities for 3rd party developers.
Website: http://www.joomla.org/
4. Media Wiki:
Media Wiki invented a whole new way of working on the web, and is a CMS for collective authoring of documents, used to power the one of the largest and most popular sites on the internet, Wikipedia.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: If you need a wiki, it is the best.
Disadvantages: Does not include many other functions / extensions of other CMS platforms, doesn’t theme well, most sites look the same.
Outlook: Follows the model to success of doing one thing extremely well, has the support of the Wikipedia Foundation, very popular authoring model.
Website: http://www.mediawiki.org/
5. Liferay:
Liferay is a popular new CMS that is great for building portals, and offers a professional look and feel that sets it apart from the other platforms.
License: MIT
Programming Language: Java, PHP, Ruby
Main advantages: collaboration, calendars, internationalization, design.
Disadvantages: More closely tied to a commercial outlook / corporate structure than most Open Source projects.
Outlook: Not as well known or implemented as some of the other CMS platforms, but nice design & features to set your sites apart from the crowd.
Website: http://www.liferay.com/
6. TYPO3:
One of the most complex and professional CMS platforms out of the box, TYPO3 is popular for business websites, especially with European companies.
License: GNU
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: design, extensions, customizations, flexibility, professionalism.
Disadvantages: too difficult to learn for most, too many proprietary conventions.
Outlook: Strong CMS for web development, sure to continue with a core of specialized developers and corporate clients, but loosing support and market share to other platforms.
Website: http://www.typo3.com/
7. Moodle:
Moodle is one of the most unique CMS platforms on this list, designed specifically for Course Management and Education, and used for online learning platforms.
License: GNU
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Huge user and development community, online education, no real competitors or similar products, extremely powerful.
Disadvantages: not really applicable for most web design purposes.
Outlook: Look for this “Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment” to continue to be the standard online operating system for education and spawn many interesting mashups with other CMS platforms as well as many more modules & extensions.
Website: http://www.moodle.org/
8. Dolphin:
Boonex Dolphin is popular among web designers who want the latest in social networking, with an industry standard look and all of the features of the popular online communities out of the box.
License: Creative Commons
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Plug-n-Play user community with all the bells & whistles.
Disadvantages: not really Open Source, must pay to remove ads, requires specific hosting requirements, difficult to install, buggy.
Outlook: Look for Dolphin to continue to be a popular choice for social networking, though its “cookie cutter” design runs the risk of becoming stale with too many sites implementing the same design.
Website: http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/
9. Pligg:
Pligg is a Digg clone that provides social bookmarking functionality for websites, allowing users to post links, vote them up or down, and leave comments.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Best for Social Bookmarking, can be themed and extended to build top quality sites like Mixx, Redditt, Del.icio.us, etc.
Disadvantages: difficult to install, mod rewrite problems, poor support on community boards, questionable Open Source future.
Outlook: With the 1.0 release of Pligg upcoming within a couple of months, look for a big surge of use back to this platform but watch out for increased commercialization.
Website: http://www.pligg.com/
10. Movable Type:
Movable Type is the main challenger to WordPress for a personal blog platform, and supports multiple users, Themes, and Tags.
License: GNU
Programming Language: Perl
Main advantages: Blogs
Disadvantages: Too closely tied to commercial products and services compared to most Open Source communities, Perl.
Outlook: Look for MT to fall off the list as other of the blogging platforms below increase in popularity, but sustain development as PR for the company’s commercial offerings.
Website: http://movabletype.org/
Honorable Mention:
Xoops, Geeklog, e107, Mambo, Nucleus
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I’m curious what you think of .Net Nuke and other Nukes? I’ve been asked about these several times in the last few months, and have been debating installing them to see how they work.
I haven’t played with the *nukes in quite a while, and when I did it was mostly with PHP Nuke. At the time it seemed pretty bloated and somewhat limiting. However, like I said that was quite a while ago. I thought durpal was like that when I tried early versions too (I think it was version 3?). I suppose I should give them another try, but I’d be interested to hear what others have to say about them too.
.Net Nuke is a Microsoft sponsored pseudo open source CMS for the enterprise. It can be a bit of a challenge to install, as the install script is a little buggy. The learning curve is a bit steep and modules are not open source, the marketplace for modules is commercialized. We are using it as a member portal for an insurance company. It seems to work pretty well. Very flexible framework. It is modeled after PHPnuke (limitations and all).
Hi, thank you.
What about Blogger is it CMS? or Not.
as you see I am using it in my blog for a while and it is a good choice for small and medium bloggers.
Thank you.
I like both Drupal & Wordpress…
Haha~~~:)
@Larbi
Blogger.com is a host of blogs supported by Google.
And It’s really a CMS, but you can’t never control it at all.
@Jeffrey
I think you may need a plugin…
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-thread-comment/
@Ceson.cn: There’s really no need for that, threaded comments are already in core and will be released with 2.7. Also, since Automattic acquired IntenseDebate they will probably get considerably more advanced.
@Aaron
Thks!
Haha, I haven’t heard about that before…
What you can tell about Silverstripe CMS? Its a really nice one..
Try it..
http://www.silverstripe.com
Druapl has a higher learning curve as compared to Joomla or Wordpress. Wordpress is becoming increasingly versatile with possible commerical applications.
Cheers for these open source content management system. But out of 10 system, I most dislike Joomla because it’s complicated for me ^^.
I like the boonex dolphin script, but it’s not the simplest thing to figure out and master. If you have time and patience you can get it to do some really impressive things that many other scripts don’t even offer.
This is a great list of open source CMS tools. Also some of good mentions in comments following it. Great !!!
I personally like Alfresco. It has best of the both worlds. It follows standards space like JSR 170 as well as manages coolness factors being accessible on iPhone/ipod touch. Plus it is easy to use and configure. Apart from that I have seen nice web services API available with it.
Also noticeable mentions are Open Source CMS (OpenCMS) and Magnolia OpenCms is a Java based website content management system. Magnolia is the first open-source JSR-170 compatible Content-Management-System (CMS).
Thanks for sharing good post. Keep it up.
Phoenix2Life
“The Drupal Association today announced that Drupal has won two prestigious Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards this week – the Overall 2008 Open Source CMS Award and the Best PHP Open Source CMS. This marks the second consecutive year that Drupal has won Packt Publishing’s Overall Open Source CMS award. In addition, on Monday, Packt Publishing recognized leading Drupal contributor Earl Miles (Merlin of Chaos) as a 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued Person (MVP).”
Source: http://drupal.org/Drupal-Wins-Best-Overall-2008-Open-Source-CMS-Award-Packt
I must admit, i've only ever tried wordpress… It seems that when you get used to something you're a little hesitant in changing things up.
awesome list …. I think drupal joomla and typo3 are best CMS.
Great Article. I like drupal. Moodle is pretty good educational package
What about Concrete5? Its a very good CMS. For people who want a website, but edit it online, but don't want all the plugins and user management for other users to register etc. Its an excellant solution. For any webdesigners, who want to allow parts of the website for a customer, to be editable by a client, but made easy, is excellant.
Drupal etc are great for huge website management projects, but I think they are overkill for other projects. :) But I agree with the list other than not including Concrete5. ;)
This is a great list of open source cms, drupal and wordpress the best ,
i personnaly like beespip squelette .
I like wp, but wouldn't really consider it a cms.
Joomla has a great community so if you ever need help, help you will get.
Drupal,Joomla and world press is very useful cms and very easy too.
thanks
No mention of Bitweaver? It's the best one out there!
Movable Type works right for me. I can make it look and behave how _I_ want, without reading massive books or having to wade through pages of PHP code (Drupal, WordPress). The movable type templates are plain HTML with movable type tags inserted for dynamic content. The movable type tags allow for looping, logic, custom variables and most of what I need to do. Lots of free plugins that are easy to install. And movable type is open source and can be EASILY extended with PHP.
Movable Type totally rocks.
I’m glad movable type does what you want. For me, I really dislike having a separate set of tags for scripting. It causes overhead that’s really not needed and usually isn’t any easier than PHP. Brian Lozier explained it pretty well in Beyond The Template Engine over at Sitepoint
Joomla is easy to learn compared to Drupal, but Drupal is more powerful.
DNN is great if you have programmers that know .Net – they can use Open Web Studio http://www.openwebstudio.com/ and build pretty much anything – custom nav, forms, wikis… possibilities are endless.
Joomla and drupal are very good CMS,
Anyway it’s a very good info for me..
Thanks
I track most CMS systems, at least the ones that have developed a significant community and user base. Joomla, Drupal, PHP Nuke, etc… after a couple of more years it looks like they will all provide the same amount of functionality and design flexibility. I’ve found that non-technical clients have an easier time managing their sites with Drupal over Joomla, and PHP Nuke, and Drupal’s taxonomy, permission system, and CCK modules have me currently favoring Drupal. Drupal is lacking quality themes though which is one reason that Word Press is currently more popular
I’d also suggest concrete5: http://www.concrete5.org/ very simple to use very scalable with design…very awesome :)