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Best Free Content Management Systems of 2012 – Make Money Online With SEO

What is a content management system?

“A content management system (CMS) is a computer program that allows publishing, editing and modifying content on a website, as well as its maintenance from a central page. It provides procedures to manage the workflow in a collaborative environment. These Procedures can be manual steps or automated cascade The primary function of content management systems is to present information on websites CMS features vary widely from system to system Simple systems display a handful of features, while that other versions, particularly enterprise systems, offer more complex and powerful features.”

Well, that’s Wikipedia’s version of the content management system and yes, I have to agree that it’s a pretty good definition. There are many CMS available both commercial and non-commercial. And you really can do a lot using a free or non-commercial content management system. Take a look at the list below and some of these may be familiar to you (Joomla, WordPress) and some you may not. I will try to offer a comprehensive analysis of each and every CMS and it is up to you to decide which one is the best. Don’t forget to give us feedback on the article and let us know if there are any more free content management systems you think should be on this list and why.

WordPress

This was introduced as a PHP-based blogging platform, but has now evolved into a state-of-the-art publishing platform. WordPress is easily the most accessible and probably the most widely used content management system. It’s free and easy to use and easy to understand at the same time. The best thing about WordPress is that it only takes seconds to get it up and running. And with the huge community of users, there are free plugins, widgets, and themes.

Joomla

Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone. It’s probably the best overall content management system out there. It’s simple: it’s extremely customizable, suitable for almost anything. Millions of websites run on this simply for its ease of use and extensibility. Joomla is typically used by small and medium-sized businesses, large organizations, non-profits, and individuals. Joomla has an admin section which is very easy to use and also has a great community so it also has a great set of options from templates and styles to adding fonts, content blocks, menu management tools and more. Just take a quick trip to the Joomla site and you’ll see why this is a popular option.

Drupal

Another popular free and open source CMS, and like many of the other content management systems listed here, Drupal can be scaled for personal blogs or enterprise megasites, and like WordPress or Joomla, it also has thousands of modules that can be added for increase functionality. And this also has a huge and active community.

Drupal is probably the most technically advanced pure content management system, as WordPress and Joomla both focus on blogs. But that doesn’t mean Drupal doesn’t have those cool blog features like profiles, user blogs, forums, and comments.

The best thing about Drupal is that it offers ACL capacity, stability, scalability and reliability. And it can be remotely installed on any server.

The downside of this is that it has a relatively low amount of plugins, including templates, so it restricts both the look and feel and functionality to a certain level. And again, the admin section is not that easy to use if you don’t have an IT background. So if you are an IT professional and still want to add some coding to your website, then this is the best solution for you.

silver stripe

SilverStripe is again a well modularized flexible PHP5 open source content management system. This is fairly new, but it’s been getting a lot of attention lately. SilverStripe has a simple and rich feature set for content editing. Silverstripe has a framework called Sapphire which is a Model View Controller (MVC) framework. With that, developers can extend the functionality and customize the base in an easy way. Content editing is so easy to use that even a novice can easily understand how to use it.

The problem with this is the lack of available learning materials. But I think it will be resolved over time, but for now, I won’t recommend SilverStripe for a large website with a lot of content.

CMS simplified

This is another free and simple content management system that has a recursive acronym and is extremely easy to use and learn. Feature-wise, this is not that complete and I can’t compare it to some popular CMS like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, but it is a very good alternative for small businesses. You can install this CMS Made Simple and have your website up and running in a matter of minutes.

MODx

typo light

dotCMS

dotCMS is a Java-based content management system. Originally, it was developed to compete with the popular PHP-based content management systems on the market, as well as to provide a counterpoint to high-cost enterprise applications. In October 2007, dotCMS 1.5 was a finalist for Packt Publishing’s “Best New Open Source CMS” award, followed in 2008 by a runner-up for Packt’s “Best Other Open Source CMS (Best Non-PHP CMS)”. dotCMS was a finalist. in the 2009 Packt Publishing category, “Best Other Open Source CMS.”

In May 2012, they released version 2.0, which is a fully functional GPL version of dotCMS and provides one of the most scalable, powerful, and easy-to-use web content management platforms on the market today.

expression engine

Radiant SMD

Radiant is a no-fuss open source content management system designed for small teams built on Ruby on Rails. It offers an endless list of amazing features and is definitely worth checking out.

This is a Ruby on Rails based content management system that is best suited for smaller organizations to manage their content. And unlike most other content management systems out there, this requires the designer to have programming skills, as it’s typically used by professional Ruby teams. So if you are a web developer and you are managing the website for your client, this is a great tool. But if you are letting your client manage the content, I suggest you look at another CMS.

concrete5

This is an open source content management system that focuses on ease of use. It has a file manager that supports bulk uploading, a good marketplace for resources, and a really good, easy-to-use layout editor.

The best thing about concrete5 is the online edition. That is, every piece of content and every UI element on a concrete5 website can be edited in place. There you can see your site as visitors see it at the same time as you can edit it. (How cool is that!!). But I must warn you, this is not as advanced as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, but that lack of complexity makes it the best solution in some cases.

dotnet nuke community edition

This is actually the first CMS I ever used and it is an open source web content management system based on Microsoft.NET. It was originally written in VB.NET, but switched to C# since version 6.0.[4]. While the most comprehensive and feature-rich CMS is the commercial professional and enterprise edition, it has a free community edition that provides almost all frequently used features for free.

Conclusion

The main intention of this article was to introduce you to some free content management systems besides Joomla or WordPress. Now, I know that most of you are using Joomla or WordPress (like me) for your blogs or websites. But didn’t it cross your mind that there might be some less popular content management systems that are great in terms of functionality? Wouldn’t you like to give it a try and try some of those? So if you’re thinking about that, then I might have achieved my goal. So let me know which is (are) your favourite? Why are you using it? Is there any other CMS I should include? Do not hesitate to leave a comment.