Finding and Using a CMS - The Best Content Management System

There's no such thing as the best or perfect Content Management System.

I've designed/written a few websites and webpages, they were all entirely written by hand, hand-written html and php and javascript. No dreamweaver, no CMS (Content Management System), just a plain text editor.

Needless to say, although you get direct control in a hand-written website, the downside is that it can be time consuming, difficult and annoying to update information, and not elegant. Handwriting websites is so 90's.

So I decided to start checking out the CMS world. The problems is, if you are a noob to CMS like me, there are over a hundred of them out there. Technically Blogger is a specialized CMS system in itself. There are so many CMS systems, that it is really hard to pick the one you want to use.

Now if you do a search for the best CMS system, you'll find that no one has a short list of the best CMS systems. The canned answer is "There is no single best CMS. Each CMS is different, and the best one for you depends on your particular needs." Great. No help there.

Finding a CMS right for you is difficult. I installed about 10 different CMS's based on what was the most popular and what seemed best suited to the website I was working on: The People's Climate Pact. After testing them all out, and reading countless reviews on the internet, I went with Textpattern. I highly recommend it if you are a PHP programmer and are building a small to medium-sized website that you want to make easy to update and add to for non-technical people. Textpattern is built on PHP and MySQL, and uses Textile, a very easy to use markup language. There is a bit of a learning curve, as the documentation is spotty and spread out, so that is a disadvantage. But with some hard work and reading, you'll figure out the ropes (it took me about a weekend, although I'm still learning), and trust me, you'll love it. Textpattern is elegant, easy to create plugins for, easy to add code snippets to, and has an easy interface. I highly recommend it.

Blogger and Wordpress Early Comparison

My three blog's right now are on blogger. I don't have a lot of complaints. It works, and the interface is clean and intuitive. There are bugs though. The compose tool does weird unexpected things with formatting, so I only use the pure html box. And Safari on my powerbook seems to hate blogger, so I have to use Firefox.

I've been toying with wordpress.com as well. I haven't put any blogs up yet, but it looks easy to use. It has a slightly steeper learning curve than Blogger, but Wordpress looks easier to customize. But on the other hand, you can do more advanced customization with Blogger. And it is more speedy.

Here's a dated but detailed comparison http://jayajha.wordpress.com/2005/09/27/bloggercom-vs-wordpresscom/

I'll update soon with more impressions.

Using WordPress.org CMS

I have been playing with lots of different CMS's (Content Management Systems) and blogging software. There are an overwhelming number out there.

If you are new to blogging and using CMS, like I was two days ago, it can be totally overwhelming. That's okay. I've been there. It's like being a kid in a candy store. There are tons of cool things, but it's hard to pick one thing that is exactly what you want.

I've actually been playing around a lot with wordpress lately. They give out free blogs on their wordpress.com site, and also they have a piece of software you can run on your web server on their wordpress.org site.

Wordpress software is really easy to install on your personal website. All you have to do is download their software, put it where you want your site to be, change some read/write/execute permissions, and voila you are done. And there are tons of cool plugins that are very useful. One called E-Commerce makes it exceedingly easy to sell things on your site. It's amazing how easy it is (with some tech savvy and know-how) to quickly setup an online store.

Overall, wordpress is very cool and easy to use. I like blogger, but I'm definitely going to give wordpress a trial to see if I don't want to use it for some new websites I am working on.