Prevaj Consultants- eCommerce & enterprise solutions and web development company: Top 10 Most Usable Content Management Systems

Thursday, August 25, 2011

2. Drupal

Drupal is another CMS that has a very large, active community. Instead of focusing on blogging as a platform, Drupal is more of a pure CMS. One of Drupal’s most popular features is the Taxonomy module, a feature that allows for multiple levels and types of categories for content types. Drupal also has a very active community powering it, and has excellent support for plugins and other general questions.

3. Joomla!

Joomla is a very advanced CMS in terms of functionality. Joomla is very similar to Drupal in that it’s a complete CMS, and might be a bit much for a simple portfolio site. It comes with an attractive administration interface, complete with intuitive drop-down menus and other features. The CMS also has great support for access control protocols like LDAP, OpenID and even Gmail.com.

4. ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngine (EE) is an elegant, flexible CMS. Designed to be extensible, easy to modify and intuitive user administration area. For designers, EE has a powerful templating engine that has custom global variables, custom SQL queries and a built in versioning system. Template caching, query caching and tag caching keep the site running quickly too. One of favorite features of EE is the global search and replace functionality.

ExpresssionEngine is quite different than other CMS in that it’s paid software. The personal license costs $99.95, and the commercial license costs $249.99.

5. TextPattern

The main goal of Textpattern is to provide an excellent CMS that creates well-structured, standards-compliant pages. Instead of providing a WYSIWYG editor, Textpattern uses textile markup in the textareas to create HTML elements within the pages. The pages that are generated are extremely lightweight and fast-loading. Even though Textpattern is deliberately simple in design, the backend is surprisingly easy to use and intuitive.

6. Radiant CMS

Radiant CMS is a fast, minimal CMS that might be compared to Textpattern. Radiant is built on the popular Ruby framework Rails, and the developers behind Radiant have done their best to make the software as simple and elegant as possible, with just the right amount of functionality. Radiant doesn’t come with a WYSIWYG editor and relies on Textile markup to create rich HTML. Radiant also has it’s own templating language Radius which is very similar to HTML for intuitive template creation.

7. Cushy CMS

Cushy CMS is a different type of CMS altogether. Sure, it has all the basic functionality of a regular content management system, but it doesn’t rely on a specific language. Cushy works is it takes FTP info and uploads content on to the server, which in turn the developer or the designer can modify the layout, as well as the posting fields in the backend, just by changing the style classes of the styles. Cushy CMS is free to use.

8. SilverStripe

SilverStripe is another PHP CMS that behaves much like WordPress, except has many more configurable options and is tailored towards content management, and not blogging. SilverStripe is built upon its own PHP framework Saphire. It also provides its own templating language to help with the design process. SilverStripe also has some interesting features built in to the base, like content version control and native SEO support.

9. Alfresco

Alfresco is a JSP is a beefy enterprise content management solution that is surprisingly easy to install. A really useful feature of Alfresco is the ability to drop files into folders and turn them into web documents. Alfresco might be a little bit more work than some of the other CMS and isn’t as beginner-friendly. The administration backend is clean and well-designed. Alfresco might not be a great choice for most simple sites, it’s an excellent choice for enterprise needs.

10. TYPOlight

In terms of functionality, TYPOlight ranks with Drupal and ExpressionEngine, and even offers some unique bundled modules like newsletters and calendars. Developers can save time with the built-in CSS generator, and there are plenty of resources for learning more about the CMS. If there is a downside to TYPOlight, it’s that it has so many features and configurable options. Even though the backend is thoughtfully organized, there are still a lot of options to consider.