Free Content Management Systems (CMS)
If you want to create your own website but don’t want to deal with the hassles of designing it from scratch, you might want to consider using a content management system (CMS) for your site. In terms of difficulty to learn and use, CMS programs generally rank between blog hosts (easier) and web editors like Dreamweaver (harder).
Most CMS programs are free, open source programs, meaning that they are created and maintained by a community of individuals and offered free of charge to you. They vary a lot in their complexity, learning curve, and features they offer. They allow you to change your site’s appearance using templates and provide, and provide search engines, news feeds, site statistics, file managers, among many others.
If you don’t need all those bells and whistles and instead just want a simple site, you should read the Free blog hosts article.
List of free Content Management Systems (CMS)
WordPress Content Management System
One unique thing about WordPress is that you can use it as a true content management system (CMS) or as a regular blog. As a CMS, WordPress is quickly becoming the most popular. WordPress is easy to configure, yet has a lot of cool features and has a ton of “plugins” that make it highly customizable. For a more detailed description, you should check out the Review of WordPress Content Management System (CMS) article. I recently switched this website over to WordPress, so you can expect a whole bunch of tutorials on how to set it up and navigate in the near future.
Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) that uses PHP and MySQL. Drupal is modular, very customizable, and has many advanced features. For a more detailed review of Drupal, you should read the article, Review of Drupal Content Management System (CMS). Having used Drupal previously for two of my websites, I also have created a bunch of tutorials on how to set up Drupal and some of the more advanced features. If you already decided to use Drupal, you should probably check out the Starting a site with Drupal article with pointers to get you started and a list of other related Drupal articles. It allows an individual user or even a community of users to publish, manage and maintain your website. You can use it to create blogs, forums, picture galleries, file upload and download sites, forums, collaborative authoring environments, podcasting, peer-to-peer networking sites, etc. The system is modular and highly customizable. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
Joomla! is an open source content management system (CMS) that you can use from an online interface where you can edit Joomla! using a WYSIWYG editor. You can add features by installing their extensions that include dynamic form builders, blogging software, email newsletters, shopping carts, image galleries, and chat software, among others. In order to run Joomla!, your web server must have Apache, PHP, and MySQL installed.
Movable Type is a Perl Based content management system (CMS) that you to build multiple websites and blogs. They have both a commercial version and an open source/free version, and this article will refer to the free version. They provide custom fields to organize data, a revision history that track changes you make, customizations using plugins, and several different themes.
eZPublish is a content management system (CMS) that uses a MySQL database and allows you to publish your content form within your web browser (like almost all CMS programs). Some of the features of eZPublish are its multimedia publishing, extensions, user management, and the ability to publish using Microsoft Word.
TextPattern is an open source CMS that uses a Textile syntax to create “structurally sound and stylistically rich web content”. It is fairly easy for anyone to modify and does offer quite a bit of flexibility. It also meshes well with CSS so that fonts, colors and sizes can be edited using CSS.
