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Joomla CMS Review

Joomla has a distinct name. Joomla is a Free, Open Source CMS developed by the same group that developed the Mambo CMS. It's written in PHP and uses MySQL database server as its back-end storage system. It is highly flexible and configurable for use in a variety of usage scenarios. It can be used to design websites of any level of complexity. Using this CMS lets a website owner separate the design, management and content publishing three different tasks which if done by regular methods of website design, will result in a set of entangled tasks that are different yet glued together with increased complexity. And the user of website is never aware of the CMS working in the background as the navigation system it creates is completely transparent to him. He just sees a normal website.

Joomla provides a number of features to the website administrator to ease out his work. It uses different modules called Managers for different set of tasks. For example, there is a Story Manager which allows the administrator to post, edit, delete, tag and categorize articles from a unified interface. The text editor in the story manager works just like WordPad in Windows and is completely WYSIWYG in nature. Similarly there are different managers for managing media, managing news feeds, RSS and ATOM feed syndication, Polls, etc. There is a facility to search the site made from Joomla built into it. So users can search for contents they are looking for without the publisher having to do anything. And if required, the site owner can specify some pages as help files, which will open in its in built help system. And what’s more, there is a trash manager too, for its obvious reasons.

Two unique features that Joomla provides are Content Display schedule which allows the owner to display different contents based on time and facility to print documents into PDF files. These two features make it stand out of the others. Apart from these there is a very good Advertising Manager module which helps the authors to generate revenue from their site by effectively placing content.

Joomla also supports a plug-in system which makes it highly extensible. It has a huge community of enthusiasts as well as professionals who have developed a great repository of useful plug-ins for it.

Joomla has greatly improved. Updates can now be done through the administrator interface. The newest Joomla will be optimized for mobile phones.

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Drupal CMS Review

Drupal is a free open source content management system application package that helps users in creating, modifying, updating and publishing the web content on the online resources. Drupal is used widely by users for creation of following kind of online resources.

Community web portals

Discussion sites

Corporate web sites

Intranet applications

Personal web sites or blogs

Aficionado sites

E-commerce applications

Resource directories

Social Networking sites

The strength and popularity of drupal CMS lies in the following features it provides to the users

Free download: The application package is an open source and can easily be downloaded from the site without any registration fee. It comes with a free GPL (GNU general public license).

Easy install: Once drupal is downloaded, it can easily be installed by a simple click that installs and configures it at the correct system path.

Freely available modules and plug-ins: The standard exe of drupal web install comes with lot of free modules and plug-ins that can be used to create more visually soothing templates and designs that make drupal a perfect CMS for applications like blogs, podcasts, news-letters, e-zines and other content management system packages.

Online resources: Drupal provides a rich online documentation that can be used to troubleshoot any kind of problem. Owing to the popularity of this package lot of help is available on internet in forums and e-books.

The Drupal CMS is open source and is easily updated and developed by an active online community of developers and users.

The standard drupal CMS comes with the basic features that facilitates creation of users accounts, provides administration interfaces, inserts RSS feed plug-ins .The basic install also provides customizable lay-outs, an online forum, a blogging panel and a tool that creates a standard website.

If the user is interested in creating a website that is SEO optimized he has all the more reasons to vouch for drupal as it provides sophisticated tools that can be used to produce scalable websites that have high visibility on any search engine. It scores higher on this term as compared to Joomla, Wordpress or Plone.

Drupal is widely used to create advanced and complicated sites and some of the reasons for why is it so are enumerated below:

1. Advanced URL Control

2. Custom content types and views.

3. Revision control

4. Taxonomy

 

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  2. MediaWiki Wiki CMS Review
  3. Joomla and Drupal Comparison
  4. How do Enterprise Content Management Systems Work?

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