Content Management Systems (CMSs) help you collaboratively create and edit content such as news articles, manuals, guides, images, videos, and brochures and other publications. There are so many that are available on the web as downloadable apps that I’m certain you’ll find one that fits your needs.

This is what they’ve got going for them:

A – They’re easy to install and use;

B – They give you ready-made templates and customized features;

C – They’re free.

I thought it would be cool to share some reviews of some of the more popular CMSs that I recently ran across. Here they are:

Express Engine:

This is a feature-rich and fast CMS, enabling users to have multiple sites running on a single installation. Users can run blogs, community forums, knowledge-base, wiki, contact forms, search engines and more. And Express Engine has a template engine that has custom global variables, custom SQL queries and a built in versioning system that is appreciated by web designers. Plus, its core plan is free.

Radiant CMS:

Radiant is an open source CMS that’s specially designed for small businesses. Some of its features: flexible templating with layouts, snippets, page parts, and a custom tagging language. Radiant has a special macro language (similar to HTML) called Radius which makes it easy to include content from other pages. It’s free, too.

Wordpress:

Wordpress is the most popular CMS for bloggers because the system allows them to start blogging immediately. It’s very easy to “get,” with a short learning curve. Wordpress has an excellent documentation and super-quick installation wizard.  It also offers a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor for people who don’t know HTML or other markup language. Wordpress also comes with built-in image and multimedia uploading support. Again, another freebie.

CushyCMS:

Specially designed for content editors and designers, CushyCMS allows users to safely edit content of web pages. Cushy features allow users to create standards-compliant and search engine-friendly content. Free, also.

Drupal:

This is an open source platform enabling users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Optional modules add interesting features like forums, picture galleries, file uploads and downloads, user blogs, OpenID, profiles and more.  Drupal is also free.

TYPO3:

TYPO3 is very user-friendly and intuitive. It offers extensive features including rich text editor, spell checker, configurable UI levels, multiple page editing, internal shortcuts, “live” search & replace, task center, internal search engine etc. You can also create templates in designer-friendly applications such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Dreamweaver. TYPO3 is a free tool.

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