Top 5 Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) to Consider

If launching a website, a blog or an online business is among your New Year’s resolutions for 2018, you should take the time to research the content management systems that you could use to build your site. Gone are the days of hand-coded websites, since content management systems have successfully replaced the way websites were being created not so very long ago. Today, all you need to get started with your online venture is a hosting plan and a CMS. While the type of hosting you have and the type of CMS you choose both have a significant bearing on the success of your online endeavors, in this article we’re going to focus on the open source content management systems that are worth considering for building your website.

Top 5 Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) to Consider

Compare Top 3 CMS: WodPress vs Joomla vs Drupal

Although WordPress is the most recognizable content management system in the industry, there are other powerful CMSs that you might be interested in, depending on the nature of your website or blog. Here are the top 5 open source content management systems that you should consider in 2017:

#1 WordPress

WordPress is easily the most popular and most commonly used platform for building a wide range of websites and blogs. WordPress’s strengths lie in its quick installation, high customizability and enormous developer and support community that backs it up. The vast array of free and premium plugins and themes as well as easy PHP and CSS file editing makes it easier for users to add functionality and design elements to their standard blog, corporate website or ecommerce site.

WordPress is also a user-friendly, SEO-friendly and multimedia-friendly platform that was built with performance and security in mind. Being as popular as it is both among expert users and beginners, WordPress can be installed on any hosting account and most hosting providers offer WordPress optimized hosting with either WordPress pre-installed or installable via one-click installs, automatic updates, backups, and WP-CLI integration.

Whatever you need to achieve with your website, WordPress is a multi-faceted platform that will allow you to build a highly polished, search engine friendly website tailored to your exact needs.

Read: How to Make a WordPress Website?

#2 Drupal

Drupal is one of the more advanced content management systems that helps developers create powerful sites with hundreds of pages that are capable of handling large volumes of visitors. Drupal is used predominantly for creating complex and interactive business, ecommerce or government sites, but it can be used to create blogs or more simple sites as well. Thanks to its complexity, Drupal is viewed as an enterprise-class CMS, or even as a content management framework, since it makes no assumptions about how content should be structured and managed.

With Drupal, the creation of search engine friendly, mobile-ready and feature rich websites is a breeze, and thanks to its scalability, power and stability, the management of large volumes of content and traffic can be achieved without problems.

Drupal has an active user and support community, but the platform itself is aimed at more advanced users rather than novices and inexperienced developers. Drupal offers a wide range of add-ons especially for business and ecommerce sites such as inventory management, shopping carts, live chat, creating database reports, project tracking tools, etc.

#3 Joomla

Joomla is another open source CMS that powers millions of websites from business websites to websites of large organizations and non-profits. In terms of complexity, it’s situated somewhere between WordPress and Drupal, being the platform of choice for small to mid-tier ecommerce or business websites, but Joomla can be used to create pretty much any type of website thanks to its highly customizable nature.

Although not on par with WordPress in terms of usability, Joomla still counts as a user-friendly platform that facilitates the creation and easy management of websites with hundreds of pages of content. The abundance of resources, tutorials, and programmer’s tools allows users to get to speed with the ins and outs of Joomla and quickly get started with their online projects.

Joomla’s admin page allows users to choose from a wide selection of options on how to manage all aspects of their content with menu management, media management, user management, module management and extension management tools.

Read: How to Make a Website with Joomla?

#4 ModX

Search engine optimized, architected for speed and mobile responsiveness, ModX markets itself as the most customizable, scalable and fastest open source PHP content management system. It’s a great SEO CMS that helps users build websites that search engines love. ModX was built with the idea to provide developers freedom of design all the while retaining robust security.

Since 2005 when it was first released, ModX has been helping users unleash their creative freedom by never dictating how you should build your website. The built-in package library delivers developers most of the tools they need to build with, which makes it more of a content management framework than a simple out-of-the box CMS. ModX leaves you in full control of your content, going as far as allowing you to change core functionality without having to hack the core code.

Apart from site performance, speed and unmatched scalability, ModX also takes website security very seriously. xPDO serves as the foundation of xMod, making sure SQL injection attacks that many platforms struggle with are successfully prevented.

#5 Concrete5

Concrete5 came into the open source content management scene in 2009 and has been thriving ever since. This CMS has undertaken the task of positioning itself as the easy-to-use, time-saver CMS to anyone from less experienced individual users to website designers and developers.

Concrete5 is simple to use right from the beginning – it’s easy to install, has thousands of add-ons at your fingertips, access to a large theme directory, makes it possible to customize your site with drag and drop builders, style editors, and facilitates the creation responsive sites that look good on any device. Concrete5 also focuses on providing marketing tools, access control tools, SEO and social media tools for an easy and comprehensive content management experience.

This CMS should be without doubt a top contender for anyone looking for a sleek, easy-to-use and customizable CMS that is backed by a no hassle support team and an eager to help user community.

Conclusion

There are many advantages to using a CMS for building a website including achieving advanced site functionalities in a short time, allowing for quick development and deployment times. The open source CMSs to consider in 2017 presented in this article are some of the most popular, easy-to-use and full-featured CMSs that you can download and use for free to launch any website from a standard blog to a high-traffic ecommerce site.

How to Choose Web Hosting for Your CMS Website?

Here are some tutorials that will help you choosing the best hosting provider for your favorite CMS:

Last updated on: January 21, 2019
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David Cross

David is the chief editor at WebHostingMedia right from the beginning. He has a great passion for building and managing websites and creating helpful content. He is also interested in programming - currently learning python.