What is an open-source CMS?

A content management system (CMS) is a computer application used to create, edit, manage and publish variety of media, including images, audio files, video files and electronic documents in a consistently organized fashion. Best of all, you don’t have to be a web developer to publish content with a CMS and you can collaborate with others to perform regular website maintenance.

Some of the best CMS platforms are open-source. An open-source CMS is available in source code form, developed in a public and collaborative manner.  In addition, the license does not require a royalty or other fee for such use. This means that you have access to the end result and the implementation of a content management system. Developers can make alterations to the code, in order to customize the CMS to meet your needs.

WordPress is one of the best CMS products around. WordPress is well known as a blog publishing application and is powered by PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plugin architecture and a templating system that make it able to present a powerful website and easy to modify.

WordPress plugins are pieces of software designed and programmed to add functionality to the WordPress platform. There are thousands of plugins available, with more being developed every day that can enhance the performance of websites.

WordPress is flexible and scalable. Other popular open-source CMS platforms include Drupal and Joomla.

What about proprietary CMS?

In addition to open-source options, there are also propriety CMS options. Many of these content platforms come with support services for a monthly fee. Even though these fees can seem low at first, they eventually have high costs. Some of the drawbacks to a proprietary system include:

• You are locked into one vendor
• Features can be outdated – and you have to pay for costly upgrades
• “Quicksand” code can result in search engine spiders being unable to properly index a site
• You might only be leasing your site

Proprietary content management systems are rarely as customizable as their open-source counterparts, and can be costly and unwieldy to modify. When you want to move your site, you’ll need to create new one because you don’t own the CMS software. Finally read the small print on the development contact because you might not even own the content on the site, which means you’re starting from scratch.