Marketing Eric

As a founder of the Pligg content management system, nothing frustrates me more than to see everyone and their mothers using Wordpress on their sites when it’s really not called for. I have nothing against using Wordpress for your blogs and other projects, in fact I use Wordpress on this very website, but many people end up using it just because they don’t know of the many other solutions out there that might do a better job accomplishing your goals for your website.

This post is dedicated to those who aren’t familiar with what free scripts are available and I will do my best to describe what each content management system is capable of and what they are best used for. This list is by no means exhaustive, but I try to address many of the more common CMS solutions and demonstrate some of the more interesting ways to use them. I will not cover forum software, since they will be covered in their own post in the near future.

Just because a script is open source and free doesn’t mean that it’s not an option when starting up a website for marketing purposes. By choosing an open source solution you are saving both time and money on development. You will find it will be easier to find competent developers who know the systems in and out and because of this they will work faster. I also encourage you to hire developers who work at one of the open source projects because they are sometimes available to work on outside projects.

Most content management systems support plugins that offer additional features provided by first and third parties. Because these plugins are constantly being added and removed with each revision it would be impractical to list all of the additional functionality gained through plugins on this post. Additionally plugins rarely offer the same quality features as the features built into the content management system.

Did you really think I would start with anything else? Pligg is my baby and I know more about it than any other CMS out there because I have come up with the ideas for many of the features and helped develop it over the past two years. What I find to be so great about Pligg is how versatile it can be, even though most people who download and install it choose to think outside of the box. I have seen a great deal of sites using Pligg in interesting ways besides the usual “Digg clone” use that Pligg was originally founded on. One such example is RottenNeighbor.com, uses Pligg’s lesser known 5 star voting method for rating neighbors.

Example Sites Using Pligg:

• Intel Cool Software
• Sphinn
• HealthRanker

Pligg was originally designed to provide an open source solution for users who want to create a site where anyone can submit an article, whether it be a written news item, image, video or audio clip. Unlike other content management systems, Pligg is designed to be a community of hundreds or thousands of authors rather than just a handful. Pligg has yet to see many dedicated software solutions to really compete with it at this point. Some other scripts offer similar capabilities through plugins, but nothing really compares to Pligg because it was designed from the ground up to operate as a multi-author social network system.

Largely the most popular blogging software available, Wordpress was one of the first popular CMS solutions available on the internet. For the purposes of setting up a typical one to ten author blog, Wordpress can work great. The Wordpress community offers a lot of great templates and plugins that provide additional functionality and support.

Example Sites Using Wordpress:

• TechCrunch
• CNN Blogs
• Other notable sites

I have used Wordpress on a variety of sites, including this one, because the plugins available for it have allowed me to tweak each install to suit my needs. I highly suggest it for anyone who wants a typical blog format for delivering their message, but for some more advanced sites featuring a more professional newspaper-type template for publishing articles I would suggest another system such as Drupal or Joomla.

I’m going to make a generalization about the rest of these content management systems because my experience with them is much more limited and they are all used in similar ways. Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Geeklog and a plethora of other content management systems all perform the same job all about as well as each other. The only differences between them is the level of support offered for each and the amount of plugins and templates offered through the community.

Example Sites Using Drupal:

• Spread Firefox
• MTV UK
• The Onion

Out of the next three CMS’s I have the least amount of experience with Drupal. It is obvious from looking at some of the example sites running Drupal that it is more than capable at running a corporate level site using Drupal. I’m not too keen about their administrator panel usability, it requires a higher learning curve than other systems.

There’s a long complicated story behind how Joomla came about, but all that I will mention about it in this post is that Joomla was originally based on Mambo. I have used Joomla in the past for a couple of projects and find that its capable of creating an easy out-of-the-box website if you have former CMS experience.

Example Sites Using Joomla:

• Brightrev
• Grande Real Villa Italia Hotel
• Móveis Estrelícia

I only mention Geeklog because it was the first content management system that I used several years ago to start Yankidank.com. Geeklog provided an excellent system to author content at the time, but they have slowed development and have been lost in the clutter of similar systems such as Joomla or Drupal. They intend on releasing a major new version (1.5) sometime over the next month. Support for comments, trackbacks, multiple syndication formats, spam protection and other features through a plugin system.

The past three content management systems are designed as an article-based solution for news sites like CNN, The New York Times and UX Magazine. There are typically three types of content management systems: Blogging, Article Management and Niche. Typically blogging platforms aren’t used in the same way as article management CMS’s and it takes a little experience to develop an eye to identify the differences. Niche CMS solutions offer more of a specific service like how Pligg creates a site similar to Digg out of the box or how Ekklesia 360 (commercial software) offers a content management solution specifically built for Church websites.

Most content management systems can be customized through plugins or additional development costs to perform just about the same things, but the idea of this article is to help you choose which CMS comes closest to meeting your needs out of the box. Rather than starting on square one with the improper CMS and taking ten steps to finish the project, you can often skip half the steps just by choosing the appropriate CMS.