Anyone who has ever been acquainted with a task of creating and managing a website knows just how time-consuming and labor-intensive endeavor it can be. To pack the site with a compelling, fresh and useful content, an intuitive navigation and a simple ordering system is not necessarily a walk in the park. That requires not only a certain level of programming experience but a content management system which will help you to meet all those requirements.

/CMS is a software tool that has been specifically designed to simplify the task of building, updating and maintaining a website. They are targeted to accomplish a wide range of goals, however finding one that fully fits all your needs is not a simple affair at all.

CMS platforms come in many flavors from commercial solutions with all the bells and whistles to open-source tools with a community of developers and enthusiasts behind.

Have a look at the presentation below and find out the different CMS types and their peculiarities.

The beauty of open-source systems

Open-source systems have many pros and cons, though are definitely more beneficial in terms of being highly-customizable as compared to commercial ones. They are quite able to meet the specific needs of any business and provide an unbeatable support from the community. Open-source platforms are available to the public free of charge or have very low-cost licensing fees. One more important thing to keep in mind is that the developers create and share a huge number of different plugins to add functionality to a website. It’s a fairly easy process and you can have most CMS powered websites getting started and running in no time. However, this involves more hands on work but the overall cost is significantly less. The most well-known open-source systems are WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Mediawiki, etc.

The distinct advantages of commercial systems

Commercial softwares, or they are sometimes called proprietary CMS, offer a powerful assembly of features right out of the box. There are countless number of such solutions out there and they come in all shapes and sizes. Commercial platforms do not require as much customization and configuration as open-source tools and can easily handle basic content management tasks. While they may not be able to compete with self-hosted ones in terms of scalability, they have several advantages of their own that make their followers gravitate towards them. Commercial systems are developed and owned by a private company and users usually have to pay licensing fees. They don’t except 3rd party plugins but come with built-in functionalities. Alfresco, ExpressionEngine, IBM Enterprise Content Management are currently listed as popular commercial platforms.

 Blogging Software

Blog publishing platforms were specifically designed to simplify creating and maintaining weblogs. Being kind of specialized CMSs, weblog applications support the authoring, editing, and publishing of blog posts and comments, with special functions for image management, web syndication, and post and comment moderation. A free blogging platform is hosted, run and managed by a business, usually for profit on their end. Free blogs enjoy the fame of being incredibly easy to set up and maintain, however they usually lack the ability to customize to your hearts desire. The most popular free blogging platforms are WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr. When referring to a self hosted blogging platform – this means purchasing web hosting space at a hosting provider. The only thing you need is your domain name, everything else is monitored and taken care about by the hosting company.

The Variety of Forum Platforms

Forum boards are fundamentally intended to handle content that comes in a flow. The essential difference between the plugin-like and a standalone is that the plugin-like forum boards are those plugins that can easily be installed to the website (bbPress, Kunena). In case you run a website – there is no need to create a forum separately. You just can download the required plugin and have a forum integrated with your website that will save your followers from authorizing twice. Standalone forum developers comprise all their mastery into the only forum functionality allowing its users to handle an outstanding discussion board (phpBB and vBulletin are bright examples of such kind of forum boards).

For Conclusion

To wrap it all up, the real deciding factor comes down to what you really need your website to do in the end and how much effort and time you’re willing to put into it. Whatever the reason of your switching across  platforms – CMS2CMS automated migration service will try to do its best to make your conversion process as seamless and error-free as possible. What is more, this online converter is a perfect solution for non-tech savvy and first-time users who have no programming background and find all those migration hassles a real nightmare.