CMS Web Applications - What is Best for You

e-dimensionz offers 11 different free one-click Content Management solutions through Fantastico; however, there are some things to keep in mind when selecting which CMS will best suit the needs for your website.

Below are the pros and cons of some of the more popular CMS Web Applications available through Fantastico:

Drupal is an advanced portal with collaborative book, search engines friendly URLs, online help, roles, full content search, site watching, threaded comments, version control, blogging, news aggregator.

• Pros: easy deployment, simple content editing, flexible, numerous modules, tagging system, search engine friendly URLs , 1 installation allows you to create and manage mulitiple websites, highly configurable, user permission handling
• Cons: Administration area clunky, administration terminology can be cryptic, adding visual themes can be time consuming, support for the free modules can be frustrating

Geeklog: A portal system with a wide range of modules.

• Pros: wide range of plugins and modifications, supports track backs, supports syndication formats, strong spam protection, very secure
  

• Cons: lacking in template modifications,

Joomla 1.5: Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable. [also offer Joomla 1.0]

• Pros: Easy deployment, intuitive administration interface, simple content editing, numerous polished modules, easy module installation, large community of developers, multi-lingual
• Cons: 1 installation = 1 website, categories can only go two levels deep, limited roles and permission allowances, URLs are not search engine friendly (there is a purchaseable module), out-of-the-box blogging functionality is mediocre

Mambo: A professional level yet easy to use Content Management System featuring inline WYSIWYG content editors, newsfeeds, syndicated news, banners, mailing users, links manager, statistics, content archiving, date based content, 20 languages, modules and components.

• Pros: stable, mature product, fairly lightweight, performs well on a busy site, allows proprietary extensions to use the Mambo API
• Cons: biggest disadvantage is the lack of new extensions for it [most developers who used to write extensions for Mambo switched over to Joomla], smaller user community

* phpWCMS: phpWCMS is perfect for professional, public and private users. It is very easy to learn and gives you the flexibility to separate layout and content. Lots of powerful but simple implemented features assists publishers and web developers too.

• Pros: unlimited page layouts, unlimited templates, simple content management, loaded with an array of useful features
• Cons: does not support a great number of add-on modules and therefore, it is not as flexible as more robust content management systems

TYPO3: TYPO3 is a free Open Source content management system for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets. It offers full flexibility and extendability while featuring an accomplished set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules.

• Pros: flexible user system, graphic elements such as headlines, menus are prepared dynamically, uploaded images are scaled automatically to the stated size, works with more types of users, and automatically, it can be protected by means of passwords so that particular sites, for instance, only can be accessed by users, who are members of a specific group of users with the right to watch the sites concerned
• Cons: large program, hard to learn, based on its own language - TypoScript

Xoops: A very popular advanced portal system.

• Pros: constantly in development with new features being developed continually, customization of modules, personalize the access of it fairly well, great search functions, multi-lingual
• Cons: a little cluttered

Its always a good idea to research a CMS before investing time in getting it set up on a CMS that won't work for you in the long run. The main purpose of a CMS is to make creating and editing content simple and easy.