Open Source CMS Comparison & Recommendation Report

This document compares popular CMSes against some predefined required features.
This document compares following CMSes:
Drupal
Joomla!
Typo3
CMS Made Simple
PHP-Nuke
Magnolia

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Drupal
Drupal is an open source, freely available CMS. This CMS is built using PHP. Drupal has a very
large user base and there are more than 630,000+ registered on drupal.org. Drupal is distributed
under GNU General Public License. Drupal community offers support over Drupal.org, IRC
channels of Druapl, forums, Drupal events, documentation and once in a year Drupalicon!
Few notable features of Drupal are:
- In built content and user management including fine grained permissions system
- Plug and play modules
- In built administrator interface
- Extendability
- Multi sites

Here is the details of Drupals features against specified criteria:

Mobile extendability:
- Drupal can be extended to use on mobile devices. To do so, a mobile device friendly/compatible
template/theme has to be created. This theme/template works as normal Drupal theme, but adjust its
elements (images, text boxes, text etc.) when viewing on a mobile device with variant screen size.
Such themes/templates are known as responsive theme/template. Now a days, Drupal has many
contributed themes which can be used for mobile devices without making any changes to any theme
files or CSS. The adjustments is done using embedded/included javascript/JS files. Using Drupal,
you can also detect the mobile device and provide different theme than the desktop site. In this case,
two theme have to be enabled on your Drupal set up. This works by installing few modules, which
detects the mobile device.

Support multiple channels:

- Drupal can publish content to various medias. Using responsive layout, mobile devices can access
the content on a Drupal site. Drupal can generate PDF and printer friendly content using some
modules.

Subscription services:
- Drupal does not provide any kind of subscriptions out of the box. However, you can add this
feature by adding few contributed modules. Like for newsletter subscription, you can install
simplenews module. For subscribtion based membership, you can use LM paypal or ubercart or
commerce modules. Drupal offers RSS feeds out of the box, it can be accessed using <domain
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name>/rss.xml. With other modules, you can convert your Drupal site as marketing sites.

Social web capabilities:

- Drupal does not offer any social capabilities out of the box other than the RSS feeds. To add this
capabilities, you need to install contributed modules which offer the features you want. For
example, if you want to publish on facebook/twitter/linkedin when some one post some content on
your site, you need respective modules connected with the applications with each of these services.
Using few modules, you do need an app with those services but you can share the content by just
clicking on the icons of the services. Few module which offer such features are: sharethis and
addthis.

Personalization and portals:

- Drupal offers user profiles by creating custom fields using admin interface. This can be further
extended using contributed modules. An admin can create multiple fields for users to provide
information in. This fields can be available at the time of registration and later can be edit from
users account page. Administrator can set different themes and front pages for different type of
users, which is known as roles in Drupal. Users can add information in the field on user profiles. If
multiple themes are enabled, users can choose one of the themes for their account when they are
logged in.
- Using Drupal, you can set up a single core with multiple sites. Here core means, single Drupal
core file base, which can be shared by multiple sites, each of which can have different
configurations and features. This set up is called Multi-site set up. With common database, and by
installing few contributed modules, such as sub domain, content/users of main/any sites can be
shared across all the sites within multi-site setup. Setting up multi sites and sub domain module
requires understanding of web server. It requires to create virtual hosts for each of the domain you
associate with main site/domain.

Content searching:
- Drupal offers in-built search capabilities. As new content or users are added to the site, they are
indexed by the search system when cron runs next time. It provides a default search result page
which can be overridden by creating a template file in theme directory. By using some modules,
content of the site can be available to search engines almost immediately.

Collaboration, engagement and interactivity:

- With Drupal, users can connect with each other using Organic groups module, which allows users
with similar ideas exchange information on a particular topic. Organic groups allows to create wiki
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pages which can be edited by any users within the group or based on the permissions set by the
group administrator. With facbook connect, Drupal for facebook, twitter, linkedin and other similar
modules, users can post their Drupal site activities to various social networks. Using OpenID and
LDAP modules, users dont have to register on Drupal sites but they can use credentials from other
site.

Accessibility and platform responsiveness:

- Drupal is an accessible tool for building websites that can also be accessed by people with
disabilities. All features of Drupal core conform with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
guidelines: WCAG 2.0 and ATAG 2.0.
- Using Drupals built int caching feature, the site performance can be improved by aggregating css
and js files. For a site with high traffic, more complicated caching techniques can be implemented.
Drupal caches entire pages in database.

Operational management information:

- Drupal has a separate section to view the web site statistics like User visits, referrals, database
logging, Access log, Page not found logs. When a content is created by any users, this event logged
in the db. Administrator can view all the content created by all the users across the site on dedicated
node content page, accessible only by admins.

Core cms features:

- Drupal offers following features out of box:
- Content management
- User management
- Module management
- Themes
- Permissions & Roles
- Search
- Caching
- Blocks management
- Menu management
- Image formats
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- Input styles
- RSS feeds
- Forums
- Polls
- Taxonomy
- Multi language
- User visits, referrals, database logging, Access log, Page not found logs

LDAP:
- Using LDAP contributed module, users do not have to register on a Drupal site, but they can use
credentials from other sites and can log in to the Drupal site.

Cost:
- Drupal is maintained by community and is available for free. All the contributed modules and
themes on http://drupal.org are free! However, there are websites that offer paid Drupal themes. But
Drupal modules are always free.

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Joomla!
- Joomla is an MVC based, open source CMS. Its mission is to provide a platform for flexible
digital publishing and collaboration. Its more than just a powerful CMS. Joomla is licensed under
the GPL.
Few notable features of Joomla are:
- Media management
- User management
- Banner managementt
- Web link management
- Content management

Here is the details of Joomlas features against specified criteria:

Mobile extendability:
- Joomla does not provide mobile device support out of the box, but using some extensions like
PDA-mambot, a mobile device compatible site can be credated. This requires created a mobile
device compatible template which will be used by the joomla site upon detecting the device. Joomla
extension is packed with all the required javascript libraries and PHP function to detect and
determine the correct version of site to send to the user agent. A desktop template can not be used
for mobile device.

Support multiple channels:

-

Subscription services:
- Joomla offers RSS publishing out of the box. But to extend the content subscription further, it
requires some extensions. Based on your requirements, you can choose from different subscriptions
extensions offering different features. To offer paid registrations, one needs to use extensions that
extend the user registration process and integrate with some payment gateways.

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Social web capabilities:

- Joomla does not offer social sharing or posting capabilities out of the box. Again, one has to use
extensions to extend joomla further to have social sharing capabilities.

Personalization and portals:

- Users can register on a joomla site but has less option to customize the experience. Joomla can
have multiple themes and it can be customized and personalize as much as you want!
- Using some extensions, joomla can be extended to use multiple sites and shared users. Using
common joomla files, multiple sites can be configured and each of them can have different
configurations and settings. All the sites can be controlled from main site. The best thing is, you do
not have to configure virtual hosts! Some extensions offers sharing the content of the site to
different social networks/services. Some extensions allows to connect/log in to a joomla site using
social service credentials. But there is not out of the box support to share content to these services.
You can add blocks/modules with polls in the sidebars, you can install more extensions that retrieve
and display information from the site like slide shows etc. If you can not find something you can
build it using Joomla API! However, Joomla does not offer to add fields to user profiles or any other
content types

Content searching:
- Joomla has out of the box search features. It also displays the search statistics to administrator

Collaboration, engagement and interactivity:

- Joomla has built in forums features. Using which users can post topics and get replies to that
forum topics. Groups extensions allows user to join groups of similar interest and collaborate with
other users. Social sharing extensions allows users to post to different web services from the site!

Accessibility and platform responsiveness:

- Joomla front end is complied with WCAG 1.0 Priority 2 and Section 508 requirements.
- By different techniques like css/js compressions, Image optimization and some caching
techniques, performance and speed of a joomla site can be optimized. Joomla can also compress the
page with GZIP.

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Operational management information:

- Joomla does not have inbuilt site statistics features. But few extensions are available which can be
used to view site statistics, page views, database logging, Access log and more.

Core cms features:

- User Management
- Media Manager
- Language Manager
- Banner Management
- Contact Management
- Polls
- Search
- Web Link Management
- Content Management
- Syndication and News feed Management
- Menu Manager
- Caching
- Template Management
- Integrated Help System
- Web Services
- In built FTP support for installing extensions

LDAP:
- LDAP in joomla is another extension to be installed! Using Openid extension, users can use
credentials of OpenId providers on a joomla site.

Cost:
- Joomal is available for freely under GPL. All the extensions available on joomla.org are free but
paid versions are also avalable.

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TYPO3
Type3 is an enterprise class open source CMS. The fascinating thing about type3 is its stable core
which is not change/modified/updated for last one decade! It offers multiple licenses, based on
different usage and support.
Some notable features of typo3 are:
- Multilingual
- Extensive documentation
- Intuitive AJAX drag & drop
- Built-in image editing
- Community and commercial support
- Spell Checker
- Undo / History
- Clipboard
- Multiple Page Editing
- "Live" Search & Replace
- Wizards
- Internal Search Engine
For admins:
- Compare Back end Users
- Flexform Configuration
- Multiple Sites
- WAP Support
- Static Content Export
- Content Staging
- Recyclers
- Content Re-Use
- URL Rewriting
- Conditional Syndication

Here is the details of Typo3s features against specified criteria:

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Mobile extendability:
- Typo3 is a very expendable CMS with an active community. To make it mobile compatible, an
extension WURFL has to be installed on a typo3 website. The WURFL extension has an XML
configuration file which contains information about capabilities and features of different mobile
devices. Basically the WURFL extension is a (rather thin) wrapper around the PHP library. Using
TypoScript, we have to build a template with special construct which is called condition. Building a
typo3 template is bit difficult because one has to be familiar with TypoScript.

Support Multiple channels:

- Typo3 sites can be configure to deliver content on mobile devices and other formats. Typo3
content can also be exported as PDF and generate PDF files from the content. Some extensions
allow to display print friendly version of the content.

Subscription services:
- Typo3 does not support RSS/news feeds out of the box. You have to install respective extensions
to achieve the same. There are extensions available for RSS feeds, newsletters and website page
update subscriptions. Using other social sharing extension. Content from a typo3 website can be
published to different social networks and bookmarking services.

Social web capabilities:

- Typo3 has lots of extensions available for social sharing and bookmarking. Few of them are:
Socials to rule them all, Community, Social Connect, Facebook Social Plug ins, Social Login to
TYPO3, Social Bookmarks, etc.

Personalization and portals:

- Typo3 does not allow user registration out of the box. It requires some extension to enable this
feature. Personalization is very limited because of limitation of extensions.
- Typo3 offers multiple site setup. That means using a main site, you can control the users and
content on other sites. Multiple site setup has single typo3 installation and database. Setting up
multiple site require some knowledge of TypoScript.

Content searching:
- Typo3 has built in search feature. It automatically indexes your content to make it appear in search
in the back end and front end.

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Collaboration, engagement and interactivity:

- TYPO3 has its own forum which has all the advanced features of other forum software. It also has
special integration with the TYPO3 news plug in

Accessibility and platform responsiveness:

- Typo3compiled to international accessibility standards, including the core and extensions.
- Using in-built advance caching techniques, Typo3 site performance can be increased. Typo3
allows to export a page as static HTML page.

Operational management information:

- Typo3 logs all the activities on the site. Several analyzer statistics and Visitor Tracking System are
available as a plug ins and provide more detailed analysis.

Core cms features:

- Rich Text Editor (RTE)
- Intuitive UI
- Configurable UI Levels
- Preview Content
- Spell Checker
- Undo / History
- Clipboard
- Front end or Back end Editing
- "Live" Search & Replace
- Internal Shortcuts
- Multiple Page Editing
- Wizards
- Task Center
- Internal Search Engine
- Switch User
- Upgrade / Install Extensions
- Manage Back end Users / Groups
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- Multiple Sites
- Flexform Configuration
- Compare Back end Users
- Multiple Templates per Site
- Template Management
- Dynamic menus
- Dynamic graphical menus
- Multiple Menu Types
- Multiple Page Types
- Audit Trail
- Log in History
- Content Approval
- User Privileges
- Email Alerts
- Sandbox
- Simultaneous Editing Warning
- SSL Compatible
- SSL Log ins
- Versioning
- FTP Support
- Printer-friendly Support
- Multi-language
- Advanced Caching
- Static Content Export
- Recycler
- CGI-mode Support
- Metadata Insertion
- Interface Localization
- Extensible User Profiles
- URL Rewriting
- Search Engine Friendly URLs
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LDAP:
- Typo3 offers extension for LDAP, using which users can log in to back end and front end of the
site.

Cost:
- Typo3 is basically uses GPL but it also offers Distribution Licenses and Contribution Licenses.

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CMS Made Simple

CMSMS is built using PHP and is available under GPL. As the name suggest CMSMS is really
simple to use yet powerful to build websites.
Some of the notable features of CMSMS are:
- Modular and extensible
- Group-based permission system
- Minimal server requirements
- Small footprint
- file manager
- XHTML and CSS compliant

Here is the details of CMSMSs features against specified criteria:

Mobile extendability:
- As most of the CMSes. CMSMS does not provide mobile compatibility out of the box. It require
building custom extension and make the CMSMS know about the devices it being viewed on. This
requires knowledge of CMSMS API and some expertise over CMSMS. You have to create a
template for mobile devices and use javascript libraries to adjust the layout of the template when
viewing on mobile devices.

Support multiple channels:

- In addition to mobile devices, CMSMS can publish content to PDF and display as print friendly
pages.

Subscription services:
- CMSMS offers no support for RSS/news feeds out of the box. Using different modules this feature
can be achieved.

Social web capabilities:

- CMSMS offers very limited feature to publish content to different social services. This is in the
form of contributed modules, it does not offer this feature out of the box.

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Personalization and portals:

- CMSMS require extra module to allow users to register on the site! Admin can manage the
registration process from backed
- Using MultiDomains modules, you can mange multiple domains with single CMSMS installation.
Each domain can be assigned on a different page-tree. There are very few modules available for
publishing the content to different social services.

Content searching:
- Because of its small footprint, CMSMS is lacking of some primary features and search capabilities
is one of them. You have to install modules to enable search on the site.

Collaboration, engagement and interactivity:

- Using different module for content authoring and forums, CMSMS can enhanced to be highly
interactive site. WYSIWYG, Blog, newsletter, guestbook, news, picture Album are the few modules
that can be used to increase interactivity and engagement.

Accessibility and platform responsiveness:

- CMSMS is complied with WAI, WCGA, Section 508
- By default CMSMS has basic caching technique implemented. This improves the performance for
a site with high traffic. Advanced caching techniques can also be implemented using modules. This
makes the CMSMS more responsive.

Operational management information:

- Statistics module is used to log and display the site statistics.

Core cms features:

- Full template support, for unlimited looks without changing a line of content
- Minimal server requirements
- Content hierarchy with unlimited depth and size
- XHTML and CSS compliant
- Accessibility WAI, WCGA, Section 508
- Design protected from content editors
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- Integrated audit log

- Admin panel with multiple language support
- Group-based permission system
- Easy wizard based install and upgrade procedures
- Multiple content areas on one page
- Modular and extensible
- SEO Friendly URLs
- Rich module API for unlimited expandability

LDAP:
- Using Ldapusers module, CMSMS makes it possible for users to log in with LDAP server

Cost:
- CMSMS is distributed under GPL license and its module are available for free to download and
use.

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PHP-NUKE
PHP-Nuke is a news automated system specially designed to be used in Intranets and Internet. So
its not a feature packed CMS!
As a CMS PHP-NUKE offers very limited features and does not support Mobile extendability,
multiple channel support or other listed services. However it supports LDAP.

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MAGNOLIA
Magnolia CMS has amazing features and technology under the hood, to ensure a product that is
open for your business development across all channels.

Mobile extendability
- Magnolia's unique Standard Templating Kit (STK) has been extended to include mobile website
templates. Mobile preview allows you to see how your content looks like on the web, smartphones
and tablets like the iPad. With Magnolia CMS's content preview for mobile devices, you can
quickly visualize what your content will look like on any device. Magnolia CMS has built in
previews for iPhone & iPad right from the page editing interface, so you know exactly which
content will be rendered on which device and how it will look.

Support multiple channels:

- Magnolia's multichannel support, you can keep track of all your output channels. Magnolia's
multichannel management allows you to define how your single source content will appear across
various channels. By defining which content you want to use and how you want it to appear, you
will be able to render your single source content to a multitude of different devices, locations and
formats.

Subscription services:
- Magnolia's built-in publish & subscribe mechanism allows you to syndicate content easily to any
other Magnolia application. RSS feeds can easily be provided for web pages created within
Magnolia CMS. Additionally, Magnolia can aggregate external RSS feeds and render them for
inclusion in any web page.

Social web capabilities:

- Magnolia makes it possible to User-generated content (UGC) can be clustered and thus made
available at all public sites at the same time. Examples of UGC include the Forum, Commenting
and Public User Registration.

Personalization and portals:

- Magnolia allows to register and log in to users but does not have such extend features to
personalize the experience.
- Magnolia can not be used for creating sub sites.

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Content searching:
- Magnolia's integrated full-text search easily lets website authors and visitors find what they are
looking for. Search is fully access controlled within Magnolia and returns only the content which
users have access to. One can search over all accessible information or retrieve content by typed
meta-data information such as author, year, keywords or any other information that has been
configured as a search option.

Collaboration, engagement and interactivity:

- Magnolia can be set up in such a way that work groups have shared access to resources, e.g. a
folder in the document management system.

Accessibility and platform responsiveness:

- Magnolia templates follow the guidelines of W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
(WCAG2m) as well as Germany's BITV (Barrierefreie Informationstechnik-Verordnung).
- Magnolia has its own caching mechanism to increase speed and minimize CPU load. The cache is
being written to the file system and is automatically updated whenever needed. The cache is
configurable by tree or by page. The caching API allows for highly customizable caching strategies.
Magnolia Enterprise Edition comes with a set of default strategies that provide superior caching
behavior.

Operational management information:

- Magnolia uses standard Log4j logging. Its extensive customization options allow developers to
tailor logs to their particular needs.

Core cms features:

- Instant inline editing
- Browser-based user interface
- Runs with any browser
- Move, copy, reorder
- AJAX
- 4-eye workflow
- Concurrent editing
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- Dependency management of content elements

- Deletion approval and undo
- Document Management System (DMS)
- Multi-step forms
- Dynamic lists
- Imaging Engine
- Role-based user management
- Automatic form-dialog generation
- Multilingual admin interface
- Translation
- Scheduled aka time-based publishing
- Address book
- Workgroup collaboration
- Web-based spell checker support
- Multilingual content
- Friendly URL's
- Accessiblity conformance
- SEO optimized
- Standard Templating Kit
- Standards-based templating in JSP and Servlets
- Code highlighting
- Freemarker as a template language
- Custom-tag library speeds up templating
- Unlimited page and paragraph designs
- Multi-site support
- Configuration extension
- Channel definition

LDAP:
- Magnolia Enterprise Edition makes it easy to deploy Magnolia in large scale intranet
environments where an enterprise-grade user management infrastructure already exists. Magnolia is
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using the JAAS standard for authentication and authorization. Company-wide single-sign-on
authentication mechanisms can be implemented.

Cost:
Magnolia is paid CMS. Different packages have different prices and features.

Recommendation:
- All the CMSes compared here has their own pros and cons. Some are used in specific situation.
But if you are looking for a CMS that provides you out of the box mobile compatibility, enterprise
level support, ready to use and above all at good price, I would recommend to use Magnolia. Im
quite impressed with its capabilities and features. This is paid CMS.
- If you are looking for an open source CMS, I would recommend Drupal. Drupal is an Open
Source CMS, backed by a very large community. It has always free modules available on
drupal.org. You need to find an experienced Drupal developer to build the site using Drupal as per
your requirements. Please note that, you should be specific about responsive layout for mobile
devices while mentioning the requirements.
So, my recommendation is:
Paid CMS: Magnolia
Open Source CMS: Drupal

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