Compare CMS - Part 3 - Popular CMS Reviews

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Compare CMS - Part 3 - Popular CMS Reviews

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author: Chris Price
originally published: 2005
updated Feb 2008

Compare CMS - Part 3 - Website CMS Reviews

Mainstream / Popular CMS Reviews on this page:-
Joomla
Mambo

See also:
Page 3a - Business CMS reviews
Drupal
OpenCMS
eZpublish
Plone

Page 3b - Specialist CMS reviews
WebGUI
Moodle
RadiantCMS
More about RoR

Page 3c - Lightweight CMS reviews
LucidCMS
CMS-MadeSimple

Page 4 - no-MySQL CMS and IIS Server CMS

Need to ask a more detailed question? Try the new CMS Forum.
Or try the specific CMS questions in CMS Q&A
The CMS start page is here: CMS Index

Our viewpoint
It's important to consider this, as obviously it will radically affect all the content here. We are SEO advisors primarily, and CMS enthusiasts second. Therefore, we tend to give prominence to CMS that are more SEO-friendly, ie likely to do better in tough market areas. As far as we are concerned it also helps if the developers make it easy to install and administer. So we tend to prefer:

    * No need for a dedicated server
    * Can be installed remotely
    * Runs on a standard LAMP server
    * Friendly URLs
    * Page code that validates
    * Clean pagecode, built on divs and CSS
    * Minimal use of scripting, especially on-page
    * Web standards compliance
    * Good accessibility values
    * Easy user content edits
    * Easy management
    * Easy templating
    * Plenty of extensions
    * Fitness for purpose: enterprise, community, brochure site etc

It should be pointed out that no CMS (as far as we know) fully complies with all the above points, with perfect marks on each - it's something of a wishlist.

More on our Website Software (webapps) Reviews Criteria

If a CMS isn't very good on several of these points, it makes it less likely we will like it, and less likely most users will finally be satisfied with it after a couple of years - which is the crunch test. You have to remember that commercial success is the name of the game now - everyone wants traffic and sales, and the only way to achieve them is to use an improved, modern CMS, that is fully search engine compliant.

It's fair to say that if cost is no object, some of these points are less relevant - you can just pay someone to sort it out for you and not have to worry. However, most users cannot take that approach so we don't prioritise for such a viewpoint; we look mainly at the OSS, semi-commercial and value commercial market, where an implementation might run from very little up to £5k/ $10k. Any costs under £1k/ $2k probably mean it is a DIY job, since there are few commercial implementers who will charge less than that.

Even then, figures at the lower end normally imply there will be little or no training or initial support (and leaving aside ongoing support) - which some would say are just as important as the software and installation. A commercial install of any kind is normally going to start at £2.5k/ $5k, unless you are talking about something simple and basic. Joomla installs are an exception, since the ratio of cost v features v time investment is far and away the best around, so costs are lower.

Why we don't have a CMS Feature Matrix
We used to, but deleted it. Why? It's not the best way of comparing the various applications. It's probably the easiest - but it doesn't tell you what you need to know. If you simply want to know what features a CMS has or can be expanded to have, just search "cms feature matrix" or "cms features chart", there are several sites that will help.

We tell you what they don't: the full technical details and why you would or wouldn't want a given CMS. Also, it's a sad fact that any CMS - no matter how impractical in the real world - can look good on a feature matrix. Most CMS can have additional functionality added via plugins, so features are only a small part of the equation. You need to know the basic type of CMS; the core functions; if you can install it remotely or not; how well it does its job; the hard tech background; and many other things that a feature matrix probably won't help with much.

There is also the simple fact that a feature chart doesn't give an accurate answer, even in that very area. Although a CMS can be expanded radically, in some cases to do virtually everything, that doesn't tell you how good it is at any given function.

The best example of this is ecommerce: shopping cart plugin availability, or even integral functionality. Many CMS advertise here as having ecommerce capability, so they get a tick on the chart for a 'yes' in this department. The fact is, though, that the majority are extremely restricted compared to a real ecommerce application. A feature chart can't tell you this.

The benchmark
A new feature here: as Joomla is now the de facto CMS benchmark, we'll put in a comparison with it after each individual CMS review, when convenient. Also, more tech spec will be input as time allows.

The word 'benchmark' has various meanings; it can be used to mean 'a very good thing that is virtually the best', or 'something well-known that is easily compared with other unfamiliar items'. We use it strictly in the latter sense - there is no such thing as the "Best CMS"; it would depend entirely on what you needed it for. In practice Joomla is the best-known - that's all there is to it. For some jobs it would be hard to beat (eg rich media publishing); for others it would be completely the wrong choice (eg anything requiring comprehensive ACL).

The CMS Section Index
Go here to find all the WCMS information on the site.

   >> Please be sure to read the disclaimer at the end <<

______________________

The Popular CMS Section
______________________

Joomla

The best multimedia publishing tool CMS - probably unbeatable for most straightforward rich media publishing tasks, though not suitable for complex enterprise-level tasks. The world's most popular CMS, with huge numbers of installed websites (reportedly a hundred thousand plus; though since there have been millions of downloads, this may be a conservative estimate), and a massive community. Around 3,000 plugins means you can do almost anything you have ever seen online within the framework of a CMS. In fact the vast range of both free and commercial plugins will allow you to accomplish more than with any other CMS. This highly-successful business model has been vital to Joomla's expansion and capability. The powerful mix of free and commercial resources has been the prime driving force behind the amazing Joomla machine.

Note, though, that no CMS can have its core feature set extended efficiently: if the basic application is not particularly good at something that has to be part of the core, adding plugins won't fix this. We state this because Joomla can be extended to cover a multitude of tasks; but it would be the wrong choice for use outside of its CMS class - for example as a multi-team full-ACL intranet tool.

-------------
Update
Joomla 1.5 has been released in late January 2008. The 1.0xx series is still being developed though; version 1.0.14RC1 is now available.
-------------

It's reasonably simple, so if you had to, you could get a site live in 30 minutes or so. There'd still be a lot to do, of course. You can build an online store, video website, music site, large business site, 10-page simple site, streaming media site, big portal site, online news magazine, directory site, document repository, almost anything it seems. The CMS software itself, and the massive number of plugins, mean this is a very capable application; but please note that all CM systems belong to a class - or perhaps two classes - and they do not work at all well outside of that class. It is pointless trying to get one to perform a function for which it is not suited.

Thousands of templates to choose from, and they are easy to modify. Many would say this has the best templating system there is. Why? Well, its flexibility and ease of use, combined with the huge number on offer. A different template can be used on every page; visitors can even specify their own templates on some set-ups. While we probably wouldn't use those features, it does show the capability of the system. Templates are based on PHP and CSS plus graphics, which means that coders can build them, savvy users can modify them, and new users can at least change the graphics to get an entirely new look.

Like most it uses PHP and MySQL. At Oct '07 it's about to take a major version leap from the 1.0xx series to the 1.5xx series. Most of the stuff from the 1.0 series won't fit the new version. Not much wrong with the older version at all though, so we'll be staying with that till 1.5 is fully sorted.

The backend (ie the admin management section) leaves every other CMS everywhere standing. It is so exceptionally good that any minor criticisms of procedures and so on are pointless. When other applications have a backend like this, they can say they are comparably easy to manage; at the moment, they are mostly years behind compared to this. Only Mambo competes here, as it and Joomla share the same origin. The strange thing is that more complex CMS often have a much more obtuse backend - which makes managing them even more difficult.

Joomla will probably go to 10k pages, but we wouldn't go much past that. Of course, given the PHP/ MySQL foundation it would most likely go to 100k pages plus; but there is a question of stability here. We aren't sure Joomla will prove rock solid at 5-figure page number size, at least in its current form. Perhaps the 1.5 series (and almost certainly the 'final' 2.0 series)* will fix that. Naturally, this is as much a question of extensions' compatibility and stability as much as anything; but a true CMS is a pretty much a bare framework, so the extensions are everything.
*Joomla is big enough and well enough run that they have a roadmap for future development; the 2.0 series envisions table-less layouts and full W3CAG / Sec508 support.

Joomla will probably do anything you need, since the reason for its huge success is the highly successful mix of free and commercial plugins. Even the commercial ones are absolutely dirt cheap though; for any other app (like eZpublish for example) they would cost at least 10 times more.

ACL isn't brilliant with Joomla, it's OK but not outstanding here. If you need different access rights for different user groups, this isn't for you. It has 8 user levels, and both backend and frontend authoring, so it isn't restricted at all; but Drupal for instance can do much more than this. The user group rights, versioning and workflow control aren't there, so it isn't really the best choice for a multi-user commercial online publishing app, or a giant intranet application. On the other hand, there are plugins that do almost anything, so if the things you need in that line can be plugged in, you may be lucky. Of course, it's a PHP/ MySQL app, so if you have access to developers, a lot of things are possible. Simplified ACL plugins include JACL and JUMA.
Go here for an explanation of Joomla ACL.

If you are looking for a CMS that will handle Flash, music, video, ecommerce, uploads, downloads and a million other things - this is the one. The forum is one of the busiest in the world, with around 1,500 posts per day, in about 50 different sections, which should give you an idea of how big Joomla is. It also means unfortunately that any general question will shoot back down to page 3 of the forum in about 2 hours... Therefore, with Joomla as with any other OSS app, you'll ideally need some friends to hold your hand for the first few days or weeks, depending. Most people probably go it alone, but you can see there are a lot of heads being banged against walls out there.

This is a problem caused by Joomla's success. Because it is so incredibly capable, and because the access to it is so easy - the bar is very low - many people come to Joomla and try to create a giant community portal first time out. It's no good laughing at this attitude because there are a lot of examples. I'm not sure why it is, but site builders with little or no background (maybe not even much with flat sites) come to Joomla and try to build a competitor to The Times Online with their first site. Actually, that wouldn't be so difficult... The lesson is, build a small one first. Especially, build one or two on your local LAN, before you sell the idea that you are a bigtime CMS implementer to your local community. Think I'm joking? You should see the Joomla forums.

Any CMS will be a major culture shock if you are coming from HTML sites - it requires a completely different way of looking at things. There are no pages on the server, just fields in a database. That about sums up how different things are.

Version 1.0.13 problems
You might find that release 1.0.13 - and subsequent - does not suit you, since it was released without checking to see if it worked with some of the most popular plugins. Any community membership plugin - like Community Builder - probably won't work with it, as for some reason they changed the password storage method. Try to get hold of the 1.0.12 version if you are thinking of having a large member-based extension, such as the SMF forum plugin. At some stage in the future, the 3rd-party extension developers will catch up with this, no doubt.

Joomla plugins
Joomla being the king of plugins has a lot of implications. It means firstly that you can do more with Joomla than any other CMS, assuming that such tasks fall within a suitable CMS class. It also means that it will have a lot of 'issues' if you don't choose your plugins wisely. The best policy when building a commercial site (i.e. one you will need traffic on) is to start with the most important extension of all first: the SEF URL plugin. Like 99% of CMS, the raw dynamic URLs are awful and are useless in a competitive commercial market. However, the core app has a reasonable SEF solution, and the resulting URLs are basically OK. They can be vastly improved, though (together with the metadata), so commercial users generally pick a plugin to do just that. There are about 10 to choose from, and whichever one you like - INSTALL IT FIRST. We can't really give you any better advice than that. Don't make the mistake of doing that at #10 on the list.

Joomla can get flaky when the plugins don't agree with each other - no fault of the core app of course - so install the most important ones first, then others in sequence, testing as you go. You can then clearly see which one has caused any problem that arises. As there are so many plugins, you may well find that another will do the job and with no inter-module issues.

Joomla ecommerce
Without a doubt Joomla is one of the strongest ecommerce / CMS combinations. Only eZpublish can compete here, but the costs are nowhere near comparable - eZ plus ecommerce is in a different price range by a long way. The Joomla-Virtuemart ecommerce CMS (available as a complete pre-built application, OSS) is the best-known of its type, and very well developed now. To say that it is bug-free would be an over-estimation; but you need to understand that something like this is incredibly complex - that's why there is only one contender, after all. Others cost a lot, or are less well implemented. Almost every CMS claims some sort of ecommerce capability; but compared to J-Virtuemart they are just pretenders. There are also other ecommerce extensions for Joomla, so this isn't the only solution. These may suit an owner with some sort of specific requirement that J-Virtuemart doesn't cover.

An excellent feature of J-Virtuemart is that the whole CMS / store can be run either as an online catalogue or as an ecommerce store, i.e. a shopping cart. With a couple of clicks you can show or disable the prices and the whole checkout section. This feature can only be described as superb. Taken together with the amazingly good Joomla backend management, this CMS/ online store solution is the answer to many people's prayers. See the example sites following, for a good implementation that shows what can be done.

One of the few criticisms of this package is that the main app's templating system doesn't cover the shopping cart / products pages. Only a dev could answer the obvious question: why the @!*& not? - but it's not insurmountable, it just brings the templating in that section back down to the level of other CMS apps. In other words, instead of being exceptionally good, templating is merely acceptable.

Joomla admin
There is only one way to describe Joomla backend administration - superb. Joomla admin is far and away the best in CMS. The admin is so good that it actually contributes to the ability of the CMS as a whole; compare that with others where the admin is something that makes the whole task more difficult.

Joomla limitations
1. Because it is so amazingly capable in terms of the total number of tasks it can handle, it is sometimes used, mistakenly, outside of its CMS class or type. There are better choices for: multi-team use; large Intranet use; public / private profile use; large page numbers capability; complex content management arrangements; document and file management; and plenty of other usage types. This applies to all CMS everywhere of course: they need to be chosen for their core feature set, applied to the specified task. There is a danger that Joomla will be used for completely inappropriate tasks, as a fit-all solution. In CMS, there is no such thing.

2. Joomla is not an enterprise-level CMS, and it is a mistake to treat it as such. ACL, workflows, audit trails, versioning and so on may or may not be able to be plugged in - but some of these functions need to be in the core to work properly. They are not present in Joomla, and ACL especially needs to be a strong core function in order to work well. Joomla is an excellent general purpose CMS, and the best rich media CMS there is - but a large enterprise CMS it is not.

3. There is a practical limit on the maximum word number per page of six thousand words, or sometimes up to ten thousand, depending on the editor used. Of course, 6,000 words per page as an upper limit - and certainly 10k - is not one that will affect most people. However, we frequently hit it on this site, since it is a very rich resource in that respect. The page crashes, and then we have to split it and rebuild it. That's why the pages keep moving! This won't affect many users though.

4. A CMS is an incredibly complex application. In some cases, the user interface has been made exceptionally slick, as here; but that doesn't change the fact that something like Joomla will be difficult for newcomers to use, and then later on, difficult for them to solve problems on. The danger is that people think it will be easy, and overreach themselves. There are a very large number of simply awful Joomla sites out there, which is probably only a statistical certainty anyway. There is a temptation for less-capable users to blame the application, but a bad workman often blames his tools. In most cases a more experienced user or a different application for the task would have solved the problem.

Any serious gripes
No; but Joomla needs much better ACL (user group roles etc); and some other publishing worktools like versioning wouldn't hurt either. Plugins fix some of this, but these features ideally need to be in the core.

Modules (and all similar functions) desperately need an additional assignment control:
Assign to all, excluding selected page/s.
You often need to de-select the index page, for example, and there needs to be a smoother way to do this than selecting every page on the site except that one. Selecting 4,999 pages out of 5,000 is a real pain, especially when many of them will be on different menus. It's very strange because this is one of the first things a sysadmin will ask for in Joomla - and where precisely to locate this most obviously-required of facilities. But if you ask J developers, they can't understand the question. Yet another example of how usability is always the last guest invited to the party.

Developers, as a whole, just don't get it: the point that they themselves are not always best qualified to judge what users need. They are so deep into the subject that they can't see the wood for the trees. In the case of Joomla, the devs have done a fine job; just a few odds and ends need fixing.

Joomla documentation
Better than for just about any other OSS project. Loads of books and PDFs out there. The tech guides aren't written in a modern user-based style, they list features; even so, this is fine stuff for the open-source world, and possible because of the immense size of the Joomla community. Even the new 1.5 series has books available; and that was true even during the RC period, before the first stable release in January '08. This is exceptional in the OSS world.

Joomla has a functional documentation team, which is a first-class achievement (other CMS may have one, but it is a matter of opinion whether you could describe them as 'functional').

It needs to be pointed out, though, that the documentation - even here - is not perfect. Technical authors in this area (ie non-professional volunteers who most likely work in a different field) haven't yet discovered that there need to be two classes of document: tech docs and easy-user guides. As a result we have our own documentation line we supply to clients, since otherwise they would not be well served. From a usability point of view, an end-user (the CMS owner), who is not likely to be technically adept, needs to be able to open their visual editor and edit content quickly. This is likely to be the first job on their list. Therefore it needs to be the first section of a basic user guide. As stated, OSS documentation teams haven't realised this yet, so we fill in the gaps.

Joomla multi-site
The term multi-site and multi-siteing has several different interpretations: multiple sites on one server, running on the one CMS; multiple proxy servers fed from one main server, for load-balancing; and multiple servers with CMS clones, again for load-balancing. Joomla has plugins for various modes, though we haven't tried them. It seems as though whatever you can think of, someone has built a Joomla plugin for it. Load-balancing is a hosting issue, so before you wade in here you should speak to your hosts. They will have their own solutions, which inevitably are based on their own preferred hardware options. So you'll need to know what they use, before you can go ahead with multi-site installs.

Joomla - IIS server issues
Joomla will run on an IIS server but it's not a great solution. In practical terms it will be running at reduced capability, due to the management issues. The server will of course need PHP and MySQL on it, so that would at least exclude the incompetent hosts who don't have a clue how to run an IIS server - they do not offer those options as they don't know how to install them.

If you don't have access to the IIS server management console, life will be difficult; and if there were no user control panel, such as Plesk, it will be worse. The IIS option (or simply a basic Windows server) is fine for LAN work, though if you are talking about an office worktool you might find issues (as ACL isn't really good enough for multi-group use). This CM system will work well for a single group, but not multiple groups.

As regards production an IIS server is not an optimal choice. Even basic things like SEF URLs are going to be a problem (though now there is a simple IIS solution, using the sh404SEF plugin). If you want to run a simple site, then you may be OK. To be honest an ASP CMS may be a better choice - see our page on ASP CMS and flat-file CMS.

It's hard to work out why you would need or want to run Joomla on an IIS server; it's possible if you absolutely have to, but some functions may be unavailable. We would look at the ASP CMS DotNetNuke first, to see if that would fulfill the brief, before worrying about how to get Joomla working well on IIS.

Examples:
www.competitionplus.com
www.itwire.com
www.gsas.harvard.edu

an ecommerce store:
http://etools.gr

Joomla comparison - verdict
The biggest and brightest online publishing tool - we came up with a new CMS class term to describe it, as nothing else seems comprehensive enough: a multimedia publishing tool. Unbeatable as a rich media publishing tool. Not an enterprise-class CMS due to the lack of ACL etc. Good community-use features; easy management; probably not suitable for very large page numbers. The small zip installer size gives no clue to its capability - this is PHP webapps in turbo mode.

High traffic? This is a server question as much as anything - caching, and clustering / load balancing solves most problems here, so if your hosts are on the case, you'll be OK. If you have high traffic, you have a high income, so anything is possible. There are Joomla sites running successfully with 33k-plus uniques per day, in other words 1 million-plus visitors per month; and the central Joomla site at joomla.org can have a couple of thousand people online at any one time - so the CMS itself can cope. Of course, it is run by a good host, which is the key to avoiding many problems and issues. The vital role of top-class hosting cannot be overstated. In any case Joomla is simply a PHP script group, and fairly streamlined at that. High loads should not be a problem; but note that this is a different question from high page numbers.

There is a faint whiff of instability in some cases; but these are always where the CMS has been heavily extended. Plugins cause the problems and these need to be much more closely examined than is current practice. The Joomla core can almost certainly handle X million uniques in any time frame you want, with suitable load balancing - it's just a skinny bunch of PHP scripts after all. But adding dodgy plugins won't do you any favours; and it's quite amusing to see forum requests for assistance with problems, which people have caused by adding anything up to twenty heavyweight plugins piecemeal.

Note that site page number size is not related to traffic - but income certainly is. There is no such thing as a busy site with low income; or there shouldn't be - it would have to belong to a very lucky but commercially naive owner. Introduce us, please!

There are several other pages on this site that feature Joomla, and can be found via the CMS Section Index on the main menu. Try this one about Joomla Myths - a hilarious collection of garbage written about Joomla, in some cases by people who should know better.

Joomla CMS - Tech Spec
cms type: multimedia publishing tool
cost: free
license: OSS (GNU - GPL)
installer includes: core files, 1 visual editor
installation type: remote via web, or on local machine
codebase: PHP, MySQL
server type needed: LAMP or similar
[can be run on an IIS server - will need PHP and MySQL - but is not the best choice for this CMS]
dedicated server needed? no
additional server apps needed: no
database type: MySQL
zip size: < 3MB; decompressed < 7MB
# of plugins available (estimate): 3,000
ecommerce option: yes - several
Ratings [out of 10]:
ease of installation: 10
admin score (capability, usability): 9
how well it performs:
[for the 1.0.xx series only]
- for its CMS type: 9
- overall: 8

Mambo

Joomla was a fork of Mambo - meaning that the developers were the same, and some split to form a new project that embodied a lot of the old one. This is a common theme in the software project world and often leads to huge gains - look at how Linux and MacOS derived from Unix.

This PHP-MySQL CMS, then, is the foundation of the world's most popular CMS. It is centred around an Australian group, who caused the split when they tightened their grip on the Mambo project.

Since the bulk of the dev team left, and started up again with a new vision and greater determination, progress has been much slower in the Mambo camp. It is a good CMS but a year or more behind Joomla; and as Joomla improves more, and faster, it pulls further and further away from its parent. A lot of the plugins still work in both, but that will change when Joomla 1.5 is released, which should happen in early 2008.

Mambo is a good PHP CMS but given that Joomla is similar but better, and has a lot more drive behind it, the choice seems clear. Recently, Mambo got a bit of a boost when some 3rd-party developers looked as if they might stop working on plugins for Joomla, but this will most likely blow over. The ruffled feathers were caused by the Joomla core dev team suddenly deciding that the monster success of the Joomla project wasn't, in fact, due to the tremendously successful mix of free and commercial plugins in vast numbers, and was presumably caused by some other factor; and having decided thus, announced that commercial plugins would no longer be welcome. No doubt they have woken up to the real world by now and moderated their demands, and the storm in a teacup will soon blow over. A stange decision with numerous anomalies, such as that some commercial plugins were approved (templates for instance), but some weren't. There's nowt so strange as folk, as the old north country people used to say. With luck, the fracas will soon be in the past.

Compare CMS - Joomla v Mambo
A cruel comparison, I believe, for Mambo; Joomla is the same but better. And the future doesn't really promise any change: the gap is likely to get larger if anything. In the future, though, if there were some things you didn't like about the new Joomla - you'd be able to come back to the 'old' version by going back to Mambo. Just a thought.

MamboCMS - Tech Spec
cms type: multimedia publishing tool
cost: free
license: OSS (GNU - GPL)

Next page: more CMS reviews >>

PLEASE NOTE: these critiques represent an entirely personal opinion. They are personal reviews. There are some negative views expressed here that are one person's opinion and may be entirely wrong. There are positive opinions here that may be equally wrong. There are obviously many people who are entirely satisfied with webapps that have been criticised in some way, and you should ask some of them before taking this material at face value. There may also be those who are unsatisfied with CMS apps, or aspects of them, that have been praised.

YOU MUST TRY THEM AND MAKE UP YOUR OWN MIND.

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