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Open source CMS, often termed as the “off-the-shelf CMS:” help greatly in bringing down costly site maintenance activities, and allow the administrators as well as individual users to manage the content. Though you may find a handful of open source CMS solutions available at your disposal, you must always consider all the aspects of each option, and carefully pick the one, which fits into your requirements. More often than not, you may also find dedicated third party support to Open Source CMS like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and the likes of them, along with custom components available at minimal cost. On the other hand, you need to pay for every single component you need on a custom CMS, and sure thing you are never going to get anything for free! Many a times, people complain that you need to learn the working of open source CMS, but it is virtually impossible to find any custom CMS, which is self explanatory. Looking at the open source option, Wordpress is the simplest of all, and has become extremely popular in the market (probably it can be rated as #1 open source CMS today), requiring just 3-5minutes for installation, and basically the interface of the CMS is indeed nearly-self-explanatory in itself. One can easily publish content, create new pages and links in the site, change user permissions, themes, and also use additional widgets and plug-ins to integrate various applications like Twitter, Google Maps, Facebook, Google Adsense etc with these CMS modules. Joomla is the next one in the line up of open source CMS, which is relatively robust in design, but a bit complex in operation as well. You may not find too many freely availablr plug-ins for Joomla, as you would in case of Wordpress, but the documentation of the entire CMS implementation is simply flawless. Plone is yet another similar open source CMS option, which is relatively less-used at the larger scale. Considering a relatively-complex solution, Drupal is another powerful open source CMS, which comes with a pragmatic and integrated approach towards the non-core CMS like online donation functionalities, email newsletters as well as similar stuff, which you may require after all, but need not be on the top of your priority list. It also offers thoroughly-integrated plug-ins with various platforms like the CiviCRM. However, the learning involved with Drupal is considerably greater than that in case of Joomla. But a common thing about all these open source CMS solutions is the mere fact that you hardly spend anything on purchasing licenses and components, whereas the biggest downside of the custom CMS is the cost of implementation of the already-existing components in the market. The testing cost is another overhead, and still you may never be assured of flawless performance, and the odd bugs will never leave your CMS until you use it for years together. The open source CMS solutions totally eliminate all these problems and are preferred by most small business users, non-profitable organizations and personal users. However, now we’re indeed moving to the next era, which will surely catch the eyes of mid-large size business users, and no wonder you go with open source CMS when you can do the same with version control solutions like Tortoise SVN, Bug Tracking systems like bugzilla, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Linux all other handy stuff for development purposes.

After creating a beautiful website, you need to manage and update it regularly. Since non-technical guys can’t understand the HTML/PHP/Java codes, every site is provided with a CMS, which features an admin panel sort of arrangement to achieve these tasks. Now, when you talk about a custom CMS module, apart from the basic content add, delete, and update functionality, there are thousands of other things possible as well. As Web 2.0 standards have become essential in any implementation, one needs to put in extra efforts to create RSS feeds, internal search, and several other functionalities, requiring more time and money.

On the other hand, robust open source CMS like Wordpress and Joomla are equipped with almost all the functionalities that one may need in the custom CMS. In case, you don’t find whatever you’re looking for, you can always take up the source code, and play around with it, so as to satisfy your business logic. However, the efforts required in this case are far lesser than that of building a new custom CMS.

Joomla happens to be a full-fledged open source CMS, which can virtually do everything you may need, (with few plug-ins), and the documentation has been maintained flawlessly on the official website. On the other hand, Wordpress turns out to be a handy solution, which is extremely easy to install-and-use, as well as easy to customize too. Both Wordpress as well as Joomla have been fully implemented in PHP and the open source community keeps on releasing free updates and plugins for these CMS at regular intervals.

While, you get charged for every update in the custom CMS, you can never find free plugins on the internet, to support an additional functionality. But, life is lot easy with open source CMS as everything is extensible and the previous work is well documented, so should you seek help in customizing the same, it is pretty easy and relatively economic to get the job done by a professional programmer. What’s more PHP, MySql are supported by almost web hosts and they are one of the most common languages in high demand, used by the open source developers as well as software professionals.

The best part of these open source CMS packages is that a large community of users has already tested the application successfully under various conditions and most of the bugs have been already identified and fixed. On the other hand, you need to do a rigorous testing to ensure that you custom CMS module is ready to be used under production environment, and any bugs

Open source CMS like Joomla work well under shared hosting environment, and are fully integrated with CiviCRM. It can be easily integrated with GetActive, DemocracyInAction as well as other common packages. It provides you with all the standard CMS features, and another good thing about open source CMS is the very fact that they support a completely configurable graphic design.

You can be rest assured that your visitors will never come to know if you’re using a CMS or not, and in case you are, then which one is it! The bottom-line is surely that one doesn’t need to shred thousands of dollars on building custom CMS and spending few bucks to customize the open source CMS like Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla is the better way to go.

It is quite possible that you may not really like the open source tools, and don’t mind shedding even thousands on getting custom applications built for your company. However, the discussion boils down to the CMS, the Open source CMS scores over custom built CMS in plenty of ways.

First and the foremost advantage of these open source CMS like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and the likes of them, includes the rebate in licensing fee. Big organizations often overlook these options and waste thousands of dollars on implementing interfaces and custom CMS with basic functionalities like RSS feeds, photo uploading, and basic content management. However, they may simply opt for an open source CMS like Wordpress and save all the money easily. Moreover, the chances are high that the custom CMS may essentially work identical to something, which Wordpress offers free of cost. On account of its impressive technical advantages, Wordpress happens to be one of the most popular open source CMS today.

Apart from being free-to-use, since Wordpress is open source, it is possible to look at the code behind each functionality and easily modify them to tune them as per your business requirements. After all, there’s no point in re-inventing the wheel, and creating new CMS just to achieve something similar to what already exists.

Another point to be noted here is that the usage of functionalities like adding pages in Wordpress doesn’t require any technical know how, and even your data entry staff can easily do this job.

What’s more, in case you try to make a CMS just for photo uploads, integrating it with other services like Twitter, facebook, Google Maps etc, you need to put in extra efforts, but Wordpress offers hundreds of ready-to-use plug-ins, in order to get the job done in a few minutes.

Above all, your customers/users/visitors will never come to know whether you’ve spent thousands of dollars on a custom CMS, or made use of an open source platform like Wordpress.

As a matter of fact, almost all common necessary CMS functionalities have been implemented on Wordpress; therefore chances are high that you may find everything that your business requires. One can find all necessary documentation related to these open source CMS on their corresponding websites, so you can pick what you need, and pay a programmer just to fine-tune the existing system, which works out to be a lot more economic, in terms of money as well as time.

Using Wordpress one can upload photos, videos, other multi-media content and files, manage existing content, add new content, and even re-use the information of one the profiles (website) on the other ( ex. by exporting OPML files for links), and cut short the set-up time further, not to mention hundreds of additional plugins and widgets available too.

Today, everyone prefers open source tools, and there’s no harm in using open source CMS like Wordpress, especially when you’re getting everything you want, without even paying a penny. Most of the non-profitable organizations have adopted Wordpress, and now even the small-medium business owners are shifting towards it as well. Even the biggest of businesses can be sustained by Wordpress, and it’s all about smart thinking rather than being stubborn upon using custom CMS every single time.