CMS Jam Content Management Systems: News and Resources

I promised this site was always going to be geared towards newbies, individual webmasters, and mom and pop businesses, and anyone who needs a website that is easy to manage. To that end, my aim is to focus on any CMS that lends itself to being easy to use. My assumption is that most people who want a web site aren’t programmers, aren’t techy geeks, and don’t really want to hire one. Instead, they just want to be able to putz around and get a decent site up by themselves. I applaud that DIY spirit, and hope that CMS Jam can help foster it.

Nevertheless, there are times when the easiest CMS’s may not be the right one for you. Maybe you aren’t a programmer, but you have been around the block once or twice in the geekdom, and you feel you can handle a CMS that is a bit more powerful and therefore a bit more complex. You may not know everything you need to know, but you feel confident in your abilities to read documentation and implement what you learn. I doubly applaud that “tackle-it” spirit, and that’s who this post is for.

So you want a CMS that is a bit more robust, but you still think sticking with a free, open source product is best for you. Which do you choose? There are quite a few good choices, but I’m going to recommend that you stick to the two Goliaths in the open source CMS ring - mainly because they come with large support communities, and lots of plugin modules and themes to choose from. And in fact, it is the wealth of choices in modules and themes that may be exactly the reason you want to move up to a more complex CMS.

Who are the two Goliaths? Drupal and Joomla, of course. If you search the web, you’ll find a lot of Joomla vs. Drupal arguments but frankly, they pretty much run neck-and-neck in this race. For every positive you list for one, you can list a positive for the other, and for every negative you list for one, you can list a negative for the other. If I had to take a stand, I’d probably pick Drupal over Joomla. In my opinion, Joomla is slightly easier, but not as flexible, while Drupal has a bigger learning curve, but can be made to do almost anything. Since both require you to jump through a few learning hoops, even though Drupal’s might be a bit harder, I think its extra functionality is probably worth the extra time spent. Still, both have plenty to offer, so choose whichever fits your learning style best.

Test them both and choose the one that is right for you.