Open-source content management solutions

We build 90% of our client sites in WordPress. Although originally intended as a blogging platform (and it is superb for blogging), it has grown into a great all-around content management system (CMS for short). We like WordPress for several reasons:

1. It’s free.
2. It has a huge developer community behind it, so tons of people are developing WordPress themes, plugins and documentation.
3. You can either install the software on your own site, or host your blog on WordPress.com.
4. With the help of plugins and the occasional code hack, WordPress is very flexible and versatile and can accommodate almost any kind of site.
5. It’s easy to use.

We do not recommend WordPress for the following types of sites, which require something a bit more powerful:

• Ecommerce (product catalog) sites. If you’re selling a few products, WordPress might suit you, but for a full, complex ecommerce solution, you will need a shopping cart. While you can use a cart you install on your own site (we recommend CS-Cart), we usually recommend using a hosted cart such as BigCommerce, which powers GardenArtandGifts.com.
• Complex community/sharing sites. If you’re trying to build the next Facebook, you will either need a hosted social networking solution such as Ning, or a CMS such as Joomla with the Community Builder component. We sometimes will choose Joomla if there is a component available for it that especially suits the type of site you’re planning. For example, there’s an excellent recipe component for Joomla (Rapid Recipe), which is why we used it to build MakeGreatCookies.com.
• Multiple sites and configurations under one “roof.” WordPress MU (or regular WordPress with multi-site plugins) may work, but for multisite functionality right “out of the box,” we like Drupal. It’s highly flexible. It suffers from a rather geeky front end, but actually is not that hard to learn and makes running multiple sites much easier.