The most popular 5 CMS: choose the best one for creation of your website

by QArea Team on Sep 20, 2012

Internet has become an integral part of today’s businesses. It helps companies to do business, developers to get new job and everyone to communicate with each other. All these activities need the creation of virtual information space. And this space is filled with websites.

Whether you are newbie who never met with website building or have huge experience in development, you can easy reproduce all your desires on the monitor. There is only one thing left – HOW? Of course, you can hire team consists of designers, developers, SEO managers, etc. or you can use content management system.

There are about 31% of websites that use CMS. You can see below the graph shows the historical trend in the percentage of website using CMS from September 1, 2011 till September 19, 2012. This is all because CMS make your life easier. And depending on your goals you can choose the most appropriate content management system.

Figure 1 Dynamic of CMS usage by the websites in the period September 1, 2011 till September 19, 2012

There are a lot of reasons for creation of your own website, such as represent your enterprise in the network (corporate website), online shop, information website, social media, galleries, blogs, forums, etc. There is trend to favor free CMS, because of their absolute advantages.

In this article we aim to show you all the benefits and disadvantages of five the most popular CMS in order to help you make the right decision.

Figure 2 Percentage of CMS usage

This dedicated diagram shows the market share trends of CMS usage. There are separated five the most popular systems which are used by 76% websites build on CMS. Only 24% of websites use other CMS. As you see, more than a half of the users prefer WordPress. And below you’ll see why.

WordPress: Powers the Internet!

This is hard to say something new about WordPress. This CMS began as innovative, usability blogging platform. But increase of its features made WordPress widely used for other website’s formats also. Web design industry has born the huge demand for WordPress development services. WordPress is used for everything from personal blogs to e-commerce websites.

Advantages:

Well, it is the most popular CMS: more than 50% CMS users prefer exactly WordPress. Probably this statistics is very strong proof of its absolute advantages.
The widest rangeof plugins, themes and widgets for galleries, forums, multilingual, different catalogs, shops, etc.;
WYSIWYG editor is provided straight out of the box for those who have problems with HTML or other languages;
Technical experience is not necessary. Admin panel is much easier than in other CMS, easy PHP and CSS file editing from within the admin screen. For example, you can easy past text from any text editor into your site, in contradistinction to Drupal or Joomla;
WordPress is also powerful enough for developers and designers who create websites for clients;

Disadvantages:

This system gives you a lot of chooses. Thus the most problem arises: how can you use all its power? This CMS works much better if you know how to customize settings.
If you are newbie you may face some issues when installing, despite the social opinion about the easiest CMS installation.

Best use cases:

This CMS is the best if you are looking for easy-to-manage website. Usage of WordPress makes easy expanding functionality of the website.

WordPress is ideal for simple websites, such as news sites or blogging;

Joomla: attractive, but shallow like your brother’s girlfriend

Joomla is the next at the popularity top and used by 9% of CMS users. This system is like a middle ground between the extensive capabilities of developer-oriented Drupal and more complex web development options than WordPress. Despite on this Joomla is still user-friendly. This system is growing as you are growing that can be more difficult with WordPress.

Advantages:

In spite that it is easier than Drupal, Joomla is still complete system;
This CMS has support for access control protocols (OpenID, LDAP, Gmail.com);
It has usability admin section with vast array of options: templates, styles, menu management tools, adding feeds, content blogs, etc.
Easy installation even for inexperienced users;
And we can’t not to mention the fact that this CMS is very beautiful.

Disadvantages:

Joomla is pretty shallow and weak, despite its universality;
This CMS has more paid than free plugins and themes, in contradistinction to WordPress. So you should be ready to pay;
It can be seemed for not advanced users that Joomla has a lot of unnecessary options, but it is still not appreciated by pro developers.

Best use cases:

Joomla is the best decision if you are looking for the CMS with ability to perform advanced functions with robust features. It allows you to build a website with a more content and flexibility than WordPress.

You can use it for Corporate Intranets and Extranets, E-Commerce apps, Community webportal, etc.

Drupal: Drupowerful!

About 7% of CMS users and developers swear by its overall power. Using this developer-friendly tool you can build complex websites. And like all powerful tools Drupal requires some technical skills and experience to operate, much more than WordPress and Joomla.

Advantages:

Developed hooks help to predict almost any issues in the system;
CCK and VIEWS modules allow to construct arbitrary data types and their displaying;
Drupal is becoming easier to use with each release;
This system is known for its Taxonomy module that allows for multiple levels and ability to tag, organize and categorize complex content;
Drupal has an active and large community;
This CMS is more a pure system instead of focusing on blogging as a platform;
A wide range of modules that can add lots of interesting features like user blogs, OpenID, forums, profiles, etc. allowing to increase functionality;

Disadvantages:

Because of its complexity Drupal is totally not for inexperienced users. For customization of Drupal modules you will need additionally programming. But you can hire Drupal professionals for your website;
Drupal is hardware-intensive, and probably some performance issues can arise. Thus you need to be sure you can handle the expense of server and the overall server infrastructure upgrading;

Best use cases:

This is a good but technically complicated solution for complex, versatile and advanced websites.

Usually Drupal is used for websites that require complex data organization, for forums, online stores, weblogs, corporate and community platform websites.

vBulletin: Bull Power for your Forum

This CMS is preferred by almost 4% of users. But in terms of popularity and traffic compared this CMS is losing its market position. vBulletin provides forum software, blog and the forum tools.

Advantages:

vBulletin is a vastly superior and innovative solution for forum creation;
Wide range of gallery and blogplugins;
Lots of skins and clear code;
Easy and nice Admin panel;
Many big forums were built on this system, because of its high security level;
vBulletin comes with an online bulletin board system backed by the most powerful forum software;
Vast of the components which make easier SEO process.

Disadvantages:

This CMS is not free;
There are a lot of options that make more complicatedfinding exactly what you need;
You have to manually edit the config file code before the installation like in WordPress;
In case if you will want to import data from other bulletin board systems you’ll have to install modification patch separately.

Best use cases:

vBulletin is an advanced forum software and content publishing suit. Undoubtedly this is a good solution if you decided to start forums board in your blog and vBulletin gives you simple control over your website.

Interesting fact:

vBulletin was developed by JelSoft, but later InternetBrands bought it. Switching the developers led to vBulletin 4 is still green. Even on the official community was a tag «vB 4 Is gay» in the tag Cloud Bookmarks.

TYPO3: Last but not least

TYPO3 is used by 2% of the websites built with CMS. And the demand for this system has grown since the release of the Version 4. This is feature richness, professional and powerful CMS. TYPO3 as any CMS has security disadvantages, but not a lot.

Advantages:

The wide range of the features are available with highly customizable and expandable;
Easy establish;
This CMS can easy refined log in for users and administrators of the site;
Effective content management and graphic;
You can easy to add content, pages, docs, images even if you are not advanced user and don’t know much about HTML and web layout.

Disadvantages:

TYPO3 needs a good hosting because it’s large;
TYPO3 is pretty hard to learn. But it still can be used by editors, admins and developers. Each next group needs more learning;
There are some gaps in the code, but developers advise a password hashing that can’t resolve the problem;

Best use cases:

TYPO3 can be used for creation of blogs, home pages, newspapers, educational, E-Commerce, etc.

So we shared with you the facts you need to know for creation the most successful and easy-managed website. It’s up to you what to choose!

Check out our related articles:

CMS, CRM and ERP – What Is It and Why?

Software Development Approaches: Methodologies & Frameworks

Custom ERP Development: Should You Go For It?

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