I’m not sure I remember who originally pointed this site out to me, but I’ve been recommending it to people for a good number of months.
OpenSourceCMS.com gives you the opportunity to try out different content managment systems of different types before you install them on your own server. It’s not easy seeing what a content management system might be like by looking at a site that uses it. It helps to see what the administrative side of the software does, too – how it is set up, how easy or difficult it may be to use, and so on.
At OpenSourceCMS, they include dozens of portals, blogs, ecommerce sites, groupware, forums, wikis, e-learning systems, and more. You can log in as an administrator, and make as many changes as you want while you are. Every four hours, they replace the software with a fresh version, and let people go back at it, testing the software out.
Even if you aren’t actively looking for a content management system, it’s worth spending some time at the site, and seeing what’s possible. There are also articles and forums, as well as user reviews of different CMS systems. If you’ve worked on web sites, but never used a content management system before, this is a nice place to learn about them.
Compare and contrast features before you play with CMS apps at this site first: http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
Thanks, Joe.
That does provide a nice easy way to compare features in two different CMS systems.
I should say that cmsmatrix usability and descriptions quality is far from good.
There are usual troubles with similar categories, like “nice urls” and “rewrite urls”. They meen the same but some CMS profiles has one or another but not two both. This makes their search almost useless.
As for me – cmsmatrix’s main advantage is quantity of profiles. I think they gathered almost all available cms systems.
Hi Alexander,
I think that you’ve inspired me to look around for some other CMS comparison sites. The benefit of cmsmatrix does seem to be the amount of profiles that theyve collected. My first thought upon seeing their page though, was that it would benefit from being organized into some type of category system.
A site that looks at CMS systems for education which had a pretty nice set of category comparisons and descriptions of how software matched those categories was this one:
edu tools.
Looking at it, I’m forced to say that it might be best to have different points of comparison for different categories of CMS systems, that depend upon why the CMS systems exist.
Unfortunately, the CMSs become more and more complicated to handle. Lots of features to consider, especially in the SEO area. Too many additional plug ins , modules and options. All existing content management systems are already reach of features and their list increases every day.
To create one web site with let say 100 pages using one of the “multipurpose” CM systems, we have to upload more than thousand files in the hosting account. Why? Just because every author of an CMS wants to add feature for every need? Personally I would prefer some “light” version if such exists that covers only the basic functionality of the CMS.
We are a Open Source CMS server hosting center and customers are really having problems with the SEO part of the many CMS systems, only a few seem to honor normal SEO expert advices and for that we have built extensions (only for .DK market) and that is to fulfill okay CMS systems that lacks of SEO facilities.
So check out you upcoming SEO if it has the SEO that you need, otherwise check with your SEO consultant, BEFORE you waste many money and time. We have seen to many sites on top 10 dropping downwards after CMS. Best regards from Steen Copenhagen… with thanks for the nice SEO fishing Site