CMS Which One?

Comparisons

Lets look at 3 of the leading open-source CMS solutions, namely WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal

Which CMS should you choose? It depends on your own needs and situation. All three are solid systems with robust communities and a huge amount of functionality that will allow you to update your site.

WordPress

WordPress is a great choice for straightforward, simply arranged Web sites. It’s the easiest system to install and understand, and is easy to maintain and update, putting site setup within reach of anyone with a sense of technical adventure. There are many predefined graphic themes available, and adapting them to your particular needs is a relatively straightforward process for someone familiar with HTML and CSS. Updating and editing images and text is also quite straightforward, and multiple add-on modules are available. However, WordPress won’t scale to support complex sites as easily as the other three systems. It’s designed primarily to support simple arrangements of two types of content—blog posts and pages—so if you’d like pages or posts to appear in many different places based on automatic rules, this is not the system for you. There is only limited support for differentiation of user roles, with no easy way to support permissions based on section or type of content.

Joomla

Joomla is a solid utility player, good for a variety of different situations. It’s relatively straightforward to install and set up. The system is divided into three types of pages: Sections, Categories, and Articles. There’s a bit of a learning curve to understand how they work and interrelate, but once you’ve got it the system provides a strong infrastructure for straightforwardly creating useful site structures to support even very large sites. Add-on modules support a wide variety of functionalities, from shopping carts to community features, providing a solid base for many different kinds of sites.

Joomla is not the best choice for sites that will be edited by many different internal content authors, as it doesn’t offer an easy way to create a workflow based on section or type of content. And while Joomla supports more complex site structures than WordPress, it is not as flexible as Drupal. Each piece of content is typically associated with a single page. This makes the system more straightforward to understand, but limits very advanced structures (like structuring a site around a multifaceted taxonomy). It’s not easy, for instance, to create your own types of content (for example, a directory of state schools that includes key information about those schools), and then show it in different views on different pages of your site. If you’re not sure what any of this means, you probably don’t need to worry about it—these are advanced considerations that won’t apply to the vast majority of sites.

Drupal

Flexible and powerful, Drupal is a great choice for more complex sites. It supports a wide variety of site structures—you can define very detailed rules as to what content should be displayed where, and build your own custom content types. It has particularly strong support for Web 2.0 and community functionality, including group blogs and user-submitted content. It’s also easy for your content administrators to find and update content.

But Drupal’s power comes with complexities. Understanding what the system offers and how to configure it is more difficult than WordPress or Joomla. The administrative screens for configuring a site have a huge number of options and settings, making them harder to interpret. And the flexibility of the system means it’s important to think through the best way to accomplish what you want before diving in. Most people will want to hire a consultant familiar with Drupal to help them set up a site rather than trying to go it alone.

Wrapping Up

While none of these systems is perfect for every organisation, open source Content Management Systems work well for many nonprofits. They’re community-minded, cost nothing to acquire and can put editing Web sites within the reach of even the most non-technical people.

Use the community aspect to help you make your decision as well—do some online research, ask questions on message boards. Don’t be afraid to take a CMS for a test run. If you don’t find what you’re looking for in a core system, it may well be available as an add-on.

The time you take to make the right choice will be well worth it compared to what you’ll save in resources over the long term.