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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.