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.
