Of all the CMS (Content Management System) applications that have flown through the internet, whether by custom design, proprietary use, or open source, Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress are the most established and community minded across the web.
Both in their millions of incarnations through corporate, business and institutional sites of all sizes, and via the burgeoning reseller theme sales market, CMS platforms, collectively, have revolutionized the internet community and created exponential growth among every group imaginable who wants to get online and make things happen. The longest established, and most widely used, are all open source, and available for free to anyone who has the interest in learning how to use them in building their own, or others’ web sites. Each of them is designed to make life infinitely easier for web designers, administrators, and users.
For the purposes of this page’s focus, we will not cover web authoring services like SquareSpace, Weebly, and Wix, because they are package services that encourage or require hosting plans. More importantly, these services, and others like them, control a proprietary platform that offers minimal to no portability of your web design, nor user control of its design content, should you want to change hosting provers. HMBailey believes these services lean towards subtle, but ultimately exploitative approaches towards beginning web authors, who are vulnerable to accepting exaggerated claims of web authoring learning curves.
Below is a fingernail snapshot of the big three systems that have dominated the online landscape for the last 15-20 years. Feel free to study the history further online. There’s plenty.
Drupal is open source social network publishing software that empowers individuals, teams, and communities to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including community web portals, corporate web sites, social networking sites and much more.
WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system. Today, WordPress is the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. To the extent that a content management system can, WordPress thinks like a writer. The workflow is intuitive. In WordPress, it’s easy to create and edit categories. WordPress also thinks like a designer.
Joomla keeps track of every piece of content on your web site, whether its text, photos, music, video, or documents. Joomla is used worldwide to power corporate intranets and extranets, online publications, e-commerce and online reservations, government applications, non-profit and organizational web sites, community-based portals, school and church web sites, and countless small buisness web sites.
HMBailey favors WordPress for most web ambitions and functionality. There are so many reasons we prefer WordPress, but in terms of its portable accessibility, universal acceptance across browsers, thorough security updates, and low altitude learning curve for beginning site managers, it can not be beat. WordPress powers over 2.5 Million websites worldwide. Making it the most dominant CMS web authoring program on the internet.