There are many Open Source CMS (Content Management System) available in the market. It always creates confusion when choosing these CMS. There are many things first you should know before choosing the CMS for you. Major thing is your requirement, It depends on your own needs and situation. what type of website you are going to construct? You must be clear on the type of website to choose the right CMS for you. I am not here to promote one CMS, every CMS have their own specialty. We can't say this one is good and this one is bad. But we can compare their certain features, which also defines their level.
If your needs aren’t very complex—that is, if you’re planning to hire someone to build you a site that’s less than several hundred pages, is generally hierarchically arranged, and will be updated by only a handful of people in your organization—any of the available systems will work fine. But if you are trying to build a site for banking sector and any financial sector where you need strong security and reliability, at that time you can compare these CMS security wise which one is high secure or which CMS has the high level of security.
If you’re planning to build your site yourself, however—or if you’re planning a site that requires complex cross-referencing of information, a number of owners and editors, or significant custom functionality— it can be worth carefully comparing the systems to choose the one that’s right for you. It’s time-consuming to switch Content Management Systems once you’re up and running, so it’s worth taking time up front to define an infrastructure that will work for the long run.
Then the question rises, How do these systems actually compare to one another? Here, i am going to illustrate 14 different areas to compare open source CMS like Ease of Hosting and Installation, security, scalability, graphical flexibility etc. This article is based on the research done by the Ideal Ware titled “2010 Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal and Plone”. They have given joomla at the second rank . The report says “The final tally showed Joomla as the market leader, followed by WordPress, then Drupal, then Plone.” So, the given comparison might seems like totally focused on these four CMS. Just try to grab the cafeterias, how to compare the CMS? It doens't matter whether you compare with alfresco or drupal.
1Ease of Hosting and Installation:
All open source Content Management Systems require the services of a web host—a company that provides and maintains the servers on which the CMS resides. These companies also connect your website to the Internet safely and securely. But not every CMS can be hosted by just anyone. Technical requirements can have a big impact on how easy it is to find a web host, and potentially on your budget. Standard shared hosting—an inexpensive arrangement in which your website is one of many on the same server—costs from $5-$25 per month. An ideal setup, where you have your own section of a server (called a Virtual Private Server), is likely to cost $30 per month or more. A virtual private server minimizes security and downtime risks, and is important to support higher traffic sites or more complex systems.
Once you have chosen a host, someone will need to download the package of code and files that make up the CMS and install it on the server. If you’re hiring a consulting firm to build your site, ease of installation is not likely to be a concern, but it’s worth considering if someone less technical is doing the job.
WordPress, Joomla and Drupal can all be installed easily on shared hosts, but Drupal is a bit more complex than the other two. You might want to have someone on hand who’s familiar with shell access, which can make Drupal easier to install and administer. Some hosts provide a central control panel that makes it easy to install all three of these systems with a single click.
Plone is in a somewhat different category. It requires a Virtual Private Server and thus is often a little more expensive to host. It also takes much more technical expertise to install. If you’re not familiar with Plone, consider a host with Plone experience who can install it for you. However, if you’re considering a Virtual Private Server anyway as a best practice to support more traffic or advanced needs, the difference in installation between the systems is minimal.
2Ease of Setting Up: Simple Site:
If you want to quickly build a straightforward website, it doesn’t matter how feature-rich the CMS is. In fact, if you’re hoping to build a site that’s less than 50 pages or so, simple in structure, and without a lot of extra features, it’s a real benefit to not have to understand and navigate through a set of complicated options. Instead you’ll want a system that makes it easy to set up your pages, and provides everything you’ll need to allow non-technical staff members to update the text and images on the site.
High quality, easy-to-install “themes” can help you build a website quickly. A theme is a graphic design layer that controls graphic elements, font and navigation styles, and page layouts. One theme can have many templates—you might have one that dictates the homepage look and the layout, and another that controls the article pages on the site. You can create your own theme, but there are many pre-packaged themes available for all four of these systems, meaning you can just choose one that works for your organization, install it into the CMS, and be ready to go. A few of these tools also allow you to easily tweak key components of the theme—like a background color or logo—without technical skills.
Along with solid themes, look for systems that allow you to easily set up your pages and a simple navigation scheme. And if you’d like your site to include an events calendar or list of news stories, look to see if these are included with the basic CMS or will need to be installed separately.
WordPress excels in this area—even someone without a lot of technical experience can get a simple site up and running without investing a lot of time. Joomla is also relatively straightforward to set up-it’s currently somewhat less-intuitive to understand what types of pages you should be using than WordPress (which only has one type of page), but the upcoming version 1.6 simplifies this a bit.
Plone makes it easy to set up site navigation, and is the only one to offer an events calendar out of the box, but installing a new theme is technically complicated. Navigation and theme setup on Drupal is straightforward, but unless your staff members know HTML, you’ll need to install a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor as an add-on module for them to edit text on the site.
3Ease of Setup: Complex Site
As you move from building simple sites to creating more complex ones, the learning curve becomes important if you’re going to build your own website. Many organizations will find it more effective to hire a consultant who already understands the CMS, as well as general best practices around building a site, rather than going it alone. If you’re planning to hire a consultant, this section isn’t relevant for you.
If you’re planning to learn the system yourself, though, you’ll need to consider how long it will take to understand the administration tools, develop custom graphic themes, master more advanced features and understand the tools available to build a navigation structure. What resources are available to help? If you want to extend your site with add-on modules, how easy is it to find out what’s available?
There is substantial documentation, including published books, on all four systems, but the complexity varies considerably. WordPress is the easiest to learn when it comes to creating themes and adding functionality. Some of its most advanced features, however, are not shown in the administrative interface unless a third-party add-on is installed, so it’s difficult to know they’re there. Joomla is also relatively easy to learn—it requires a bit of a learning curve to understand the terminology and structure, but once you do, it’s comparatively straightforward to set up even fairly advanced sites.
Drupal is another step beyond in complexity—there’s a lot of options, settings and screens, and the flexibility of the system means it’s important to think through the best way to accomplish what you want before diving in. However, the admin interface in the upcoming Drupal 7.0 release will simplify the process a bit. The Joomla website lists and rates add-ons; you’ll need to use the site drupalmodules.com to see ratings and reviews of Drupal add-on modules. Plone is the most difficult system to learn—even professional technologists are likely to require some training to master it. The system provides a lot of power, but that also means a complex set of options and settings to learn in order to take advantage of the available features.
4Ease of Use: Content Administrator:
When it comes to updating text and images in a CMS, simplicity is of paramount importance for many organizations. Can non-technical staff members find and edit pages quickly? How hard is it to add a new page? How easy to add an image, a link to a document, or even a video? Can you paste text from Microsoft Word, or does that result in a big mess? Can you undo a change that you accidently published? None of these systems is difficult to use, but all four are likely to require a bit of training for less technically savvy people.
WordPress has the edge in this area. A polished interface, easy tools to add and manipulate images, and straightforward support for undoing publishing mistakes make it friendly to learn and use. Plone also offers friendly and polished support, allowing non-technical users to not only update pages and images but also sidebar items and almost any page text with ease. Joomla is the most polished and friendly looking of the systems, with an emphasis on icons and usability. However, there’s less editing functionality in the core system than WordPress or Plone—the administrator will need to install third party tools to support image manipulation or undo publishing mistakes, and editors can’t easily see how the text they are editing will look in the full context of the page without actually publishing it.
Drupal provides straightforward page editing (once you have installed an add-on module to allow editing without knowledge of HTML), but some more advanced editing tasks may require content administrators to venture into Drupal’s formidable site-setup interface, which poses a training challenge. The new 7.0 release provides a revamped admin interface, easing some of the learning curve.
5Ease of Use: Site Administrator:
Content Management Systems are not, unfortunately “set and forget” kinds of things. Someone will need to manage the users who can update and create new content, and install new updates which add features, address security issues and fix bugs. Look for a system with an easy update process that doesn’t make frequent major changes, which can break themes and add-ons. It’s also useful for a system to continue to support old major “legacy” versions of the system with security updates, so you can opt out of a major update, at least for a while.
You’re also likely to want to make changes to the structure of the site—to add new sections, edit footers or sidebars, or delete images that aren’t actually being used. And you’ll need to back up your site regularly— without a backup, if your web host were to suddenly go down, your entire site could be irrevocably lost. Some systems make these tasks easy; others require considerably more technical expertise or learning curve.
WordPress makes site management easy, with oneclick upgrades and tools to manage users, images and the navigation bar. Joomla, Drupal and Plone all provide reasonably easy-to-use tools to manage users, update sidebar content or backup the site content, but require site administrators to have a bit more technical skills to install new upgrades. Plone updates in particular require the administrator to know how to edit a somewhat-complicated text file, and how to restart the entire Plone system—requiring someone with more technical know-how.
6Graphical Flexibility:
As the graphic design for your site says a lot about your organization, graphical flexibility is an important factor. All four systems allow you to create a custom graphic theme which controls the design, fonts, colors and layouts of your pages. Creating a theme isn’t a trivial process in any of these systems; it takes a technically savvy person with HTML/CSS skills. The details of implementation vary—for instance, you’ll want to think about how you’ll define the look of your sidebar elements, or create different looks for different parts of your site. But all four systems allow extremely granular control over look and layout, which means they can support pretty much any graphic design and layout possible using standard website scripting languages.
7Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization:
Features that make it easier for the visually impaired to use your website—generally referred to as “website accessibility” features—have a lot in common with features that enhance your website’s likelihood of appearing prominently for desirable keywords searches on sites like Google or Yahoo, generally known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. For both it’s important that the CMS use common conventions within the code it creates for your webpages—for instance, using the tag “H1” to denote a top level header—and provides access to change information like alternative text read by a screen reader when a picture is displayed to others.
In the United States, websites for federal government agencies are required to be compliant with the standards listed in the “Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973,” often referred to simply as Section 508, or 508 compliance. While these standards are not specifically applicable to nonprofits— even those funded by the government—they’re a useful set of guidelines by which to judge the systems.
Only Plone ensures that both the administrative tools and the default themes are specifically and purposefully 508-compliant. The upcoming version of Joomla, version 1.6, also includes 508-compliant versions of the administration interface and themes. You could build your own theme for WordPress or Drupal to make your public site 508-compliant. The WordPress community offers specific add-on modules and themes to bring their administration site into compliance, but you’d need to do substantial work with custom themes and add-on modules to make Drupal compliant.
Plone and Joomla 1.6 shine in the area of SEO as well. Websites that include keywords relevant to their content in a lot of key places place the best with search engines, and Plone and Joomla 1.6 handle this well by allowing you to update the page title and descriptions that are used by search engines, and include keywords in a human-readable URL (as opposed to just strings of numbers, for example). WordPress, Joomla 1.5, and Drupal provide less robust functionality in this area.
8Structural Flexibility
The rubber really meets the road with Content Management Systems in how well, and in how many different ways, you can organize complex content. If all content has to fit into a simple hierarchical structure, you aren’t going to be able to create as dynamic a website as you can with a CMS that’s more structurally flexible.
Structurally flexible systems offer the ability to display some information—like a news story, or a description of an upcoming event—in different ways in various lists on the site. For instance, you could show the titles of your next two upcoming events on the homepage, a full list with descriptions for the next two months on the events page, and just the financial events in the finance section.
Other complex features differentiate the systems. Can you manage lists or directories of unusual types of content, like schools where your programs are offered? Can you change what appears in the sidebar of the page without changing the whole page template? Can you easily define custom forms to collect information from your visitors? Can you support a set of affiliated websites that share some pieces of content, but not others?
Both Plone and Drupal are strong in this area. They allow you to create custom content types and site structures, then granularly determine what content goes where on the page and on the site. Joomla offers some flexibility, but is not as strong in determining what is shown where on your site, or in creating custom content types. The Joomla core system only supports three levels of hierarchy: sections, categories and articles in the current version, and makes it a bit difficult to define that a sidebar should show everywhere except a certain page—but both limitations are overcome in the upcoming 1.6 release. WordPress is the weakest of the four within the core system, but offers substantial functionality to support custom content types, unusual directory structures, and where sidebars appear with community contributed add-ons.
9User Roles and Workflow:
If only a few people will be working with the content on your website, you don’t need specific functionality to manage user roles or how content tasks flow from one person to another. But if your site has a lot of complex, categorized content that’s handled by multiple people, a CMS that can assign users permission to add, edit or publish content by site-specific criteria (for example, by type of content or by section) can be useful. For instance, you might want to say that any of 10 people can edit the pages in their own sections, but a central person must approve everything before it can be published. Similarly, it’s often useful to be able to control who can view what on the site.
It can also be helpful for your staff members to be able to easily see what needs to be done by whom and when—the ability to, for instance, get notifications from the system when something needs to be reviewed, or create a to-do list.
Plone is the most powerful system of the group in this area. It allows the highest level of control of user roles, user permissions and detailed configuration of the flow of content through the system. Drupal also has a detailed and granular system for user roles and permissions. Site managers can define custom user roles and be very specific about what roles have what permissions. There are modules that also allow permissions by node (content unit) as well as by taxonomy (content category). But Drupal does not have Plone’s out-of-the-box powerful workflow configuration. WordPress and the current version of Joomla have a relatively small number of defined user types.
You can’t define different kinds of user roles, and users have access to either only their own content, or all content on the site—there is no way to limit permission to access content based on other criteria in the core system. The new Joomla version, however, changes this with a vengeance; the new release offers much more flexibility, with the ability to define roles based on section, content type or more.
10Community/Web 2.0 Functionality:
Content Management Systems offer many options for organizations to interact with their constituents. Visitors can comment on articles, forward on your articles, “like” you on Facebook, or even publish their own blogs. CMSs can help visitors subscribe to your site content through RSS feeds, or allow you to pull content from other sites via RSS and display it on your own.
For more advanced community building, social networking features—like the ability for visitors to create their own profiles on your site, and then link to other people or groups—can be useful. So can the ability to accept and post content (such as stories or photos) from visitors. A good Spam filter is important to keep blogs and comments useful, because when you open your site up to the world, you unfortunately open it up to Spam.
Drupal was designed from the ground up to be a community platform. It shines in this area, offering profiles, blogs and comments out of the box, with enhancements available through add-on modules. WordPress is, at heart, a blogging platform, and so has many robust blogging and comment features as well as add-ons to create social networking sites . Joomla and Plone offer somewhat fewer community features in the core, but a number of add-on modules provide some support.
11Extending and Integrating:
If your needs are especially unusual, you may have to create your own add-ons. All four systems allow developers to flexibly program custom add-ons. WordPress, Joomla and Drupal add-ons are coded in the widely used PHP coding language. Plone add-ons are coded in Python, a less-widely used programming language, making it harder to find developers to create those add-ons—but the system offers strong tools to allow programmers to create almost any kind of customization.
In addition, many organizations want to integrate their CMS with other organizational systems, such as constituent databases, accounting systems, event registration or broadcast email packages. Joomla and Drupal have pre-existing connections to the constituent databases CiviCRM, Salesforce and Democracy in Action, while Plone and WordPress have connections to Salesforce and Democracy in Action. A CMS that already integrates with your database out of the box is the ideal choice, but all four systems offer robust custom data integration support to those with the programming skills to take advantage of it.
12Security:
All software by nature has vulnerabilities, so when you’re shopping for a CMS, it’s not a simple question of a secure versus an unsecure system—the ideal CMS is the one with the fewest identified, and fastestresolved, vulnerabilities.
Websites can suffer different types of attacks, such as SQL injections, which are designed to capture sensitive data like usernames and password; link hacks, which insert links (usually invisible) to Spam and/ or pornographic sites; or Denials of Service, which prevent visitors from viewing site content. Dealing with these attacks is a bit of an arms race, as hackers are constantly on the prowl for vulnerabilities.
The instant one is identified, it starts spreading around the hacker community. This makes it important to fix vulnerabilities immediately. And the more popular the CMS, the more important it is to fix those vulnerabilities fast.
Plone is the strongest in this area. It has very few reported security vulnerabilities, and is immune to SQL injection attacks, as it doesn’t use SQL. Drupal and Joomla have more reported vulnerabilities, but they promptly issue updates to fix them. WordPress has the most reported vulnerabilities, and is the only one of these systems to that has security issues identified by security watcher Securitas.com that have remained unfixed.
13Support/Community Strength:
In the past, support for open source software has come primarily from the community of developers and users. More recently, for-profit consulting and development firms have also become important vehicles for support. When choosing a CMS, it’s critical to factor in the strength of the community. How easy is it to get answers to questions? Can you hire someone who knows the system to help you? Are there enough addon modules to meet your needs? And for all of this, how likely is it that the system will become less widely used and thus harder to support in the future?
All four systems have robust developer and user communities with lots of free support available from a variety of community-centered and third-party sources, such as forums, IRC and email discussion lists. And all four systems have a substantial network of developers, designers and consultants who provide paid support. Several good books about each system are available that are suitable for beginning users as well as developers. Help on each system is available now and into the foreseeable future.