There is huge number of Content Management System available today and many more entering the market. Some of them are free and open source while others are propriety and commercial. Some of them target a small niche content type while others try to target everything.
- Portal – Portal is what many people think while talking about CMS. Portals organize all the content of a website using access pages and menus. Yahoo is an example of Web portal. Drupal and Joomla are examples of such CMS.
- Blog – Blog or Weblog is a type of CMS in which articles and posts are organized chronologically. Blogs are great for constantly changing information such as News or Bulletin Boards. WordPress and Movable types are widely used Blogging Softwares.
- Wiki – Wiki is a type of CMS that allows users with appropriate access rights to easily create and modify content. Wikipedia is an example of Wiki Site that anyone can edit. Mediawiki is the CMS software used by Wikipedia.
- Forum - Forum (or Internet forum or Web Forum) is a type of CMS used for holding discussions among users. phpBB is one of the popular forum software.
- Groupware - Groupware (Also called Collaboration Software) is a software or application that allows people to work collaboratively for example calenadar, office documents etc.
There are many more CMS based on Content type like e-learning, e-commerce, images, audio, video etc.
Open source vs Propriety CMS
CMS Software category has some very good Open Source software with very dynamic community. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal are all great open source software supported by huge community. There are 1000s of plug-ins/extensions available if standard software doesn’t meet your requirements.
Enterprise CMS vs Web CMS
CMS can also be differentiated based on the users targeted. Some CMS targets Enterprise while others target Web users.
Hosted vs Self installed CMS
CMS software needs to be installed on a webserver. However, there are many hosted applications that can be used. Blogger is free hosted Blogging service from Google. There are other paid services also. The advantage is that you do not have to worry about hosting, administrative and other maintenance issues. The disadvantage is that you don’t have total control over your CMS and website.
