CMS - Important Points To Consider - Part 1

Important points to consider for your content management system (CMS).

 

Commercial versus open source

In general, commercial CMS solutions are more expensive, more reliable and may present specialized functionality, or a quality level, not found in open source. On the other hand, free open source solutions cost less and major ones like Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla are often released under the GNU Greater Public License (GPL) which states that the developer must make the CMS's source code available to you. If for any reason, you change vendors, it is very simple to find an experienced supplier who can take over an open source project. If you use a commercial CMS, you may discover that there are no other people who know how to work with it, or even worse, that the basis that your website is built upon does not belong to you.

 

Modules, features and flexibility

It is vital to go into your website project with a well defined vision of where your business is heading and what features your website will require as it expands. Features that are available with one CMS may be difficult or expensive to develop for another.

 

Content handling system

There are two primary methods a CMS can use to handle content creation. The majority of CMSs use dedicated content types which means that each kind of content (for example pages, events, articles, etc) needs the installation of a dedicated component. This system has the ability to be streamlined but can also result in significant development costs if you must handle content types that are not already supported by the CMS.

 

The other method is open content types. These CMSs provide a content type creation interface that permits you to build your own content types and add the necessary data entry fields to them.