Open Source CMS

Content Management Systems provide a very practical and quick solution for the daunting tasks related to creation, maintenance and management of a web site application. It provides a new and better way to do these tasks which were once considered very technical in nature and not the cup of tea of an average computer user. The philosophy behind CMS and specially Open Source CMSs is to empower these average computer users by giving them an approach to website management that is as easy as typing an article in a Word Processor.

Like every other product in the software world, CMS systems too had been commercialized by vendors to churn profits from this great idea. Some of these are even open source but you pay money for gaining support from the company in using and possibly troubleshooting it at times. But there are also CMS packages available that are both Open Source and Free. These packages include Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki, Wordpress etc. These are mostly community driven projects where everyone is free to participate in the development process.

Open Source CMS systems are usually written in some open source web programming language. The popular choices include PHP, Perl, JSP etc. By Definition, ASP.NET is also a free language under ECMA specification so some free, open source CMS are also surfacing like the AxCMS and Umbraco CMS which are written in ASP.NET. But these are not completely free as of now as currently ASP.NET only runs fully on Internet Information Services or IIS which is a paid server by Microsoft. But projects like Mono which aims at porting the complete ECMA specification of .NET on Linux and Apache server are progressing very fast.

Basically, the Open Source CMSs available today are of 3 types:

Website Management CMSs: These include CMS systems which allow you to create and manage a complete, traditional looking website. These CMS are also called General Purpose CMS sometimes. Any type of site can be created with these but they are most of the time, overly complex. Examples are Joomla and Drupal.

Blog Systems: These are specialized types of CMS that are specially suited to create personal weblog kind of sites where posts are shown one after another in chronological order. These systems are very popular these days due to their simplified, easy to use interfaces that can be used to create a website quickly that shares your views with the rest of the world. In other words, a no-nonsense solution. Example is Wordpress

Wiki Systems: These systems are a kind of documentation systems which are editable by its registered users. So these are useful when more than one person's content is to be shown on the website. Example is MediaWiki CMS.