Who is this for?

This article is for web design clients, business owners, and other people whose eyes glaze over when you start throwing acronyms around. Designers and developers can look these things up for themselves, and will usually know what the buzzwords mean. But if you’ve ever gone CMS shopping and thought, “Well that all would sound very nice if I knew what the heck they were talking about…”, then this article is for you. I suggest having a read, narrowing down your list of options, and bringing it to your designer and/or developer to figure out which is the best option for you. If you’re in a large enough company that you have a whole design and development team, you should probably let them narrow down your list of options.

"Most CMSs allow only a select few to manage content. Community CMS like forums and social media sites allow every user to manage their own content, and then make that content available to everyone else."

Framework CMS

A framework CMS is designed to handle just about any task you care to throw at it, so long as you have some programming skills, or a developer on the team. What it does is provide a basic, well… framework… for you to build your own CMS, usually with the help of modules or plugins made by the developers and the community. The most well-known example is Drupal.

"This is the kind of CMS you choose if you have specific, custom needs, but don’t want to build everything (especially the admin UI) from scratch. It is not the kind of CMS you pick if you want to get up and running fast. Framework CMS are often chosen by large organizations that need as much flexibility as they can get, and that have big budgets, or in-house design and development teams."

Blogging CMS

One of the more popular kinds of CMS, blogging systems are everywhere. Nearly every developer who wants to try their hand at building a CMS builds a blog engine at some point. Most of these don’t take off, but once in a while, you get a big hit. There are blog engines for every programming language and hosting platform. There are blog engines designed for every possible form of blogging you could imagine. There are quite possibly thousands of hosted blog engines, and easily hundreds of managed blog platforms. Some blog CMS, like the aforementioned WordPress and the newer Ghost, have both hosted and managed versions. The big three kinds of blogs are text-based blogs, photo blogs, and video blogs. I won’t go into too much detail on this as the names are fairly self-explanatory. Most blogs are text-based, which can obviously have embedded images and video as well. The difference is mostly about the focus of the blog. In other words, if photos are the majority of your content and the primary attraction for your users, it’s a photo blog.

"Some CMSs aren’t just about publishing your own content for your audience to see. There are many that are designed to encourage more user interaction, with a strong focus on building a community of regulars."

Forums

If you spent any time just browsing the Internet in the pre-Facebook era, chances are that you’ve run into one of these. For everyone who was doing real-life stuff at the time, or is just very young, forums came before Facebook pages, and are infinitely better, if you can get people to stick around.Basically, it’s a CMS that allows any member to start a discussion with other people. These discussions are usually sorted by topic or categories set up by the site’s administrator and/or moderators. It’s slower than a Slack channel, but the entire conversation is there for everyone to see, and it gives people more time to formulate replies. Due to their past popularity, there are many, many software options for people who want a forum (heck, there are forum plugins for WordPress), but only a few big ones. Invision Power Board has been the leading commercial solution for years, and phpBB is the biggest open source alternative.

News boards

These are a bit like forums, only instead of people starting discussions with their own words, they submit news stories. Users can then leave comments on the news board itself. Once upon a time, Digg was the big news board in town, especially for the tech crowd. In time, that mantle passed on to Reddit. If you’ve never been to a news board, you should check out Reddit to see how it works. Or if you want something more design-focused, check out our very own Web Designer News.

Social networks

That’s right, you can make your very own Facebook clone with any one of a variety of managed services or hosted CMS. Or, you could build a dating site like OkCupid. Mind you, managing a social network of any kind is hard work, and you’ll likely never get as big as the big names. Most people who build their own social networks these days have a very specific theme or central cause in mind, much like those who build their own forums and news boards. So, all of these are great options if you have a niche. Or, you know, just start with a Facebook page. Like news boards, most social networks are custom-built. The best free/open source option I’ve found so far is Dolphin Pro. If you don’t mind paying someone to take care of the technical stuff, you can build a social network on the Ning’s managed platform.

E-commerce CMS

E-commerce systems are usually massive and complex by design. I mean, sure, the idea is simple: they let you sell things online. The reality is naturally a lot more complicated, as you might expect when running a business. The big-name e-commerce CMSs don’t just show your products on the front end of a site, and put a “buy” button on the screen. They help you handle inventory, shipping, currency conversion, payment processing, taxes, customer service, and anything else you can imagine. They’re built to handle business, which can easily be as complicated online as it can be in person. The three big names in e-commerce systems are Magento (Community Edition is free), ZenCart (fully open-source), and Shopify (a paid, managed platform).

Portal CMS

Portal CMS hail from a time when every website wanted to be the next Yahoo(!), or AOL. This was back in the day when, rather than trying to get everyone signed up to the newsletter, every webmaster with ambition wanted their site to be your home page. These sites were usually designed to show loads of information at once, anything you might possibly want from around the web. Thus, they were called “portals”. Most were custom-built, but of course people wanted ways to build their own. One of the early options for this was Mambo, an open source CMS that died off a few years back. Now, many businesses swear by its successor, a fork of Mambo named Joomla.

Wiki

That’s right, you can get your very own wikis up and running, and for free. Most of the best wiki software is available under one open-source license or another, including Mediawiki, the software that runs Wikipedia.

"Naturally, these are large, often very complex CMS, with advanced systems for determining who is allowed to edit and change what. Their use case is rather limited by definition: a wiki is a massive, encyclopedia-style collection of information, usually used for reference. That said, you can make a wiki on any subject, and large organizations often use them to display support-related information for their products."

Enterprise CMS

These are designed, well, for enterprises. They’re huge, they’re complex, they’re meant to handle massive amounts of information. I’ll be honest, having never worked in an enterprise-level company, I’m not entirely sure how they all work. The general idea, as I understand it, is that they rarely have much to do with customer-facing websites. Enterprise Content Management (or ECM) handles all of the documents relating to the processes that a company uses to get things done. They serve primarily as a resource and reference point for employees. They are also being used to store documents, both those regarding the company, and the customers. For example, if you handle a lot of contracts, you might store digital copies of them in an ECM, sorted by customer, for easy access. ECM, then, acts a lot like a digital file room. Those times when they are used for customer-facing sites, those sites tend to be massive, as enterprise CMSs are designed for handling that amount of information. Think of University sites, government portals, and other sites like them.

Custom CMS

Last, though certainly not least, we have the custom-built CMS. These come in every shape and size, and are designed for every conceivable purpose. The pros are fairly obvious. You get exactly what you want, and only that. This usually results in a smaller, faster CMS that just does what you need it to. However, if you have the need, and the budget, you can always have your favorite developer build more functionality on top. The downside is that your support options will be severely limited. If the original developer is no longer available, a new developer might have trouble making sense of the old code. Also, when server technologies get updated, a custom CMS will sometimes need to be adapted to them. CMS developed by a dedicated third-party will be updated automatically. If you have a custom CMS, you’ll need to hire a developer to do it. Custom CMSs are often best suited to companies that have their own in-house development team to work on updates, upgrades, and security fixes.