Thursday, 6 December 2012
When you think of adding a website to your
business, what is it that you think of? Most of my clients when we first talk
about the elements of their website, the usual words that come out is “Easy to
update” or “Something I can upload pictures too”.
I just recently got back into commercial
website development. Back when I did it before in the late 90’s we did
everything from scratch. Granted, web pages didn’t look as good back then and
we didn’t have to worry about different CSS variants and the lack of
forgiveness from Mozilla (I miss Netscape). So when I restarted working in this
new environment I was resistant to use a Content Management System.
Then someone introduced me to Joomla and I
fell in love, hours and hours I would have spent on coding were saved! And the
features! And the Security! Needless to say I was sold, and it made websites
easier to sell to clients.
Right now there are 3 big popular players.
Although there are more, I will not cover them but please feel free to comment
and let us know your thoughts about the others available out there. I also like
to cover these ones because they are open source and GPL, which as a web
developer brings our cost lower to the client.
Wordpress (Wordpress.org)
For the client side, Wordpress is the
easiest to update. It is fairly idiot proof and full of fun components. Also on
the developer side, it is also one of the simpler ones to program add-ons for
so it becomes an over-all favourite and is more widely used. When it comes to
moving from version to version the program is forgiving to previous components
and relieves the need to constantly update the modules as you upgrade.
This CMS is designed for bloggers, but many
have found the ways to manipulate it to be an excellent framework for websites.
This is where Wordpress can be tedious. It has it specific format of how
content should be displayed and can only be customized so much.
For people looking for one page sites,
simple content or selling one product or service, this Is the way to go. This
is also for people with less technical knowledge who plan on changing their content
frequently.
Head over to this article to see popular
sites built on wordpress
http://www.zoopmedia.com/websites-that-use-wordpress-1674/
http://www.zoopmedia.com/websites-that-use-wordpress-1674/
Drupal (Drupal.org)
I can’t speak too much about Drupal because
I have not used it much, but from what I do know about It, Drupal can be very
powerful. It is more of a framework system than a CMS but still embraces the
same concept.
Drupal is up there with Joomla as a more
powerful system that was design to for making full websites, not blogs. I have
seen some neat things done with Drupal, and although it is not my personal
first choice it should never be underestimated. In-fact the only reason I did
not get into it is because it was under a code freeze (http://drupal.org/node/578446) when I
got back into web development, so it never came up as a framework candidate.
But when Drupal 8 comes out next yet and will have all the advancements needed
for mobile use I think I may revisit it.
Head over to this article for popular sites
built with Drupal
http://artatm.com/2010/02/showcase-of-popular-website-developed-using-drupal/
http://artatm.com/2010/02/showcase-of-popular-website-developed-using-drupal/
Joomla (Joomla.org)
Although I am trying to give my fair
opinions on each of these, I build most of my sites in Joomla. I find it
developer friendly and the style of PHP it is written in matches mine so I find
it very easy to manipulate. Just like Drupal, Joomla can be very powerful and you
can build some beautiful sites on it. It also has the design that it can be a
website with a blog implemented. I have done this for a couple of clients and
it has worked well for this.
Joomla’s downside is when you need to move
from version to version. The framework can change so much that your old
components may or may not work when you upgrade. So you have to take a lot of
caution. This becomes disappointing because the new version of Joomla (3.0 http://www.joomla.org/3/en) has exactly
what every developer needs right now to make a modern, mobile friendly site but
will need to go back to the drawing board and test everything before doing the
upgrade.
Head over to this article to see popular
sites built with Joomla
http://magazine.joomla.org/issues/Issue-July-2012/item/800-10-most-popular-websites-using-Joomla
http://magazine.joomla.org/issues/Issue-July-2012/item/800-10-most-popular-websites-using-Joomla
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