A comprehensive comparison of Content Management Systems (CMSes)
Wikipedia defines web content management system as “a software system that provides website authoring, collaboration, and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage website content with relative ease.” The web contents can be in the forms of login features, databases, audio, video and other applications. There are several content management systems available in the net market. Some of the major web content managements include Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, DNN, Umbraco, Sitecore, Kentico and SageFrame. In this article, I have compared SageFrame 2.0, WordPress 3.3, Drupal 7.0, Joomla! 1.7.3, DNN 5.5.1, Umbraco 5, Sitecore 6 and Kentico 6.Though each of these content managements have many things in common, yet they differ significantly in terms of system requirements and security issues, support types and ease of use, performance and management issues, and flexibility plus built – in applications.
The system requirements vary for various CMSes. SageFrame, DNN, Umbraco, Sitecore and Kentico require IIS/.Net application server and MSSQL database while Wordpress, and Drupal work on Apache server with MySQL server. SageFrame, Umbraco, Sitecore and Kentico use C# as programming language, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla use PHP, while DNN uses VB (visual basic) although the latest release seems to be in C#). In terms of operating system SageFrame, DNN, Umbraco, Sitecore and Kentico require windows operating system while WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are platform independent.
Security is a major issue on any web site – therefore the content management systems often come with security features so as to build secure sites. SageFrame, WordPress, DNN, Umbraco, Sitecore, Kentico come with Captcha while Drupal, Joomla and Umbraco offer Captcha as free addon. All of them have content approval, email verification and granular privileges features. LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) authentication and Login history are absent in SageFrame. There is no NIS (Network Information Service) authentication in SageFrame, Drupal , Umbraco and in Kentico. Similarly, SMB (Server Message Block) authentication provision is not present in SageFrame, Drupal, Umbraco and Kentico, DNN and Sitecore include this feature in the form of Free Add on.
The extent of support provided by the above mentioned CMSes also differ significantly. Except for DNN, there are no certification programs available on any of these CMSes. The commercial manual, support, training, online help, professional hosting and services, public forum, users conference and public mailing list are present on all these CMSes.
The ease of use is a very subjective experience what one might think as easy might be difficult for others However we have broken down the components that we believe eases the deployment of a site in a particular CMS. All of the CMSes in comparison have friendly URLs feature, site set up wizard, online CSS management, WYSIWYG(what you see is what you get) editor, server page language. Inline page editing and UI levels, is difficult in Drupal while central management is complex in DNN. Subscription costs extra in Joomla while SageFrame provides support for a fee. One thing that SageFrame triumphs over other CMSes is the ease of its use. If you try SageFrame once, you will truly marvel at the way SageFrame is built to facilitate the web development process with a minimum effort.
I feel that the above article is a lot to chew at one go, so I will be completing this comparison on my next blog. In the mean time you can visit the website of the above mentioned CMSes. At first, you might begin your own evaluation of these CMSes by downloading SageFrame.
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