With a Content management system one of the most frequently asked questions is 'What is the best opensource Content Management System for me?' which isn't the easiest question to answer in a few words...

The Right CMS Selection

Let’s define a couple of important concepts before going into the detail of this topic.

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

A CMS is a system that manages a website's content, without requiring any HTML knowledge, to link pages and to control how the pages look. A CMS makes it much easier for users to create, edit, and publish their content on a website.

What is the scope of CMS?

CMS is available in commercial and Open Source licenses. It can be written using different languages such as PHP, Perl, ASP, JSP, etc. To help limit the scope of this document, I will only cover open source CMS that are written in PHP.

What is the definition of content?

Content can mean different things to different people. It can mean news, articles, Blogs, Wikis, forum posts, picture galleries, source codes, file managements for download, product for e-commerce and so on. Good content control is the handling of formatted text, images, sound and video files.

Should I use a CMS that needs a database?

This decision will have to be made early on as you may not be able to afford a web hosting service that includes a MySQL database. In this case you should reduce your search to CMS applications that run using what’s called a “Flat-File” system. This is a system that does require a database to run. It creates its own database using files of some sort be they php files, html or text files. There is only one disadvantage with this type of CMS that is speed.

As your flat-file database grows it will slow down. A flat file database will comfortably run with 1000 web pages containing 2000 characters of text in them. This is approx 2 Mb of file size.

You see some examples of flat file CMS applications here:

Examples of some database driver cms applications

• Joomla
• e107
• Elxsis
• Drupal
• Wordpress
• Jaws