10 Best Open Source Content Management Systems

From the days, I’ve been working as a web developer. I started with manual HTML pages to create the websites around. Slightly and slowly I come to know about Open Source Content Management System.

What is Content Management System?

A content management system (CMS) is the collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based. The procedures are designed to:

• Allow for a large number of people to contribute to and share stored data
• Control access to data, based on user roles. User roles define what information each user can view or edit
• Aid in easy storage and retrieval of data
• Reduce repetitive duplicate input
• Improve the ease of report writing
• Improve communication between users

In a CMS, data can be defined as nearly anything – documents, movies, pictures, phone numbers, scientific data, etc. CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, revising, semantically enriching, and publishing documentation.

From Wikipedia.org

What does Open Source means?

Let me tell you this in a very human – friendly language. A software that can be used, redistributed or rewritten free of charge is known to be Open Source software. Such as phpBB, WordPress, Joomla

What if we combine both “Open Source” and “Content Management System”?

A software that is easy to use and admin friendly, beside this it allows to modify the code to provide what you want is termed as Open Source Content Management System.

Hope i explained you well, Lets get back to the point. There are 10 best Open Source CMS. I prefer to use first two. Else are great but i didn’t found them so interesting to code them more better to get what i really want.

1. WordPress

WordPress often used as a blog publishing application developed using PHP and MySQL. It has a lot of features including a plugin stuctures and a template & coding friendly system. It is used by 300 of the 10,000 biggest websites. At the end of September 2009, WordPress was used by over 202 million websites around world wide web. The quantity of the users has raised after that. I personally and professionally like and recommend this to everyone.

2. Joomla

Joomla! is platform for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets as well as a Model–view–controller (MVC) Web application framework. It is written in PHP, stores data in MySQL and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization.

Within its first year of release, Joomla was downloaded 2.5 million times. Over 5,000 free and commercial plug-ins are available for Joomla.

3. Drupal

Drupal is written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It claims to be used as a back-end system for at least 1% website all around the internet, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites, including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. Use of drupal is also made for knowledge management and business collaboration.

4. Mambo

Mambo (formerly known as Mambo Open Source or MOS). It is a full featured CMS platform that can be used in making small websites to large corporate websites. Plugins made mambo easy, for user and administrator both. Some of them include forums, multimedia galleries, e-commerce and shopping carts, document management tools, customer relationship managers and lot more.

5. Movable Type

Movable Type honored weblog publishing system developed by the company Six Apart. It was announced on 3 September 2001, and v1.0 was publicly under the release made on 8 October 2001. On 12 December 2007, Movable Type was relicensed under the GNU General Public License as free software.

6. Moodle

Moodle (stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) is e-learning software platform, also known as a Course Management System, Learning Management System, or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). As of January 2010^, it had a user base of 45,721 registered and verified sites, serving 32 million users in 3 million courses.

7. Liferay

Liferay is developed under Java. An ease in use and you can make the software work for you as per your requirements. Since development is made under Java most users using this CMS are Large enterprise companies but if you want to build a huge website and with best security then get a Liferay.

8. DotCMS

dotCMS is for building/managing websites, content and content driven web applications. dotCMS includes features such as support for virtual hosting, WebDav (beta), structured content, clustering and can run on multiple databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL and Oracle. It also includes standard wCMS features like page caching, templating, and a API. There are a number of features and modules in dotCMS, including RSS feeds, AJAX calendar, a reporting engine, news listing, blogs, forums, user tracking and tagging, built in search engine and language internationalization to name a few.

9. Modx

MODx web application framework for publishing content on the world wide web and intranets. The license is made under GPL. MODx is developed in the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database. MODx was awarded Packt Publishing’s Most Promising Open Source Content Management System in 2007.

10. FrogCMS

Frog CMS is originally developed by the company Philippe Archambault. The design decision taken from its start was to use PHP5 as the language for the software, along with a MySQL database backend, although it also has support for SQLite (version 3). It is a port of the Ruby on Rails CMS known as Radiant, although Frog has begun to take its own development direction.

Hope you enjoyed my post!

Good luck choosing a CMS for your site!