Top CMS and Social Media Picks for Smaller Publishers

Probably should have linked to wordpress.org (not .com - two completely different branches). The .org self-hosted is the real choice for online publishers - customization allows far more than blogging with online magazine, newspaper and other CMS capabilities. There's literally nothing you can't do with it with a bit of tweaking.

Well, actually, it usually does cost thousands. Drupal, for example, might not cost anything to download and install, but if you want to actually make it work specifically for your organization somebody is going to have to spend many, many hours configuring it, designing it, customizing it, extending it, etc. I suppose if an organization is willing to basically use Drupal's functionality and general layout as it exists out-of-the-box, install a few plug-ins (that may or may not be kept up to date as Drupal itself advances, which opens up an entirely new set of issues down the line), and modify the look-and-feel in only the most superficial ways, costs can be kept to a minimum. However, my experience is that few organizations will (or should) make such compromises. So yes, even an open source solution is going to end up costing many thousands of dollars in the end. There are without question major advantages of open source solutions, including TCO, but this headline is a bit misleading. Also, it appears that Joe's company has quite a lot to gain by promoting Drupal. While Drupal is certainly a smart product that should be on anybody's evaluation short list, Joe's comments that "this is by far the best solution for small publishers" should be taken with a grain of salt. I would argue that Drupal MIGHT be the best solution for SOME small publishers, but that every organization has somewhat unique needs and given the overall costs involved both in the implementation itself and the long term consequences of picking a platform it is oftentimes a worthwhile investment to hire an independent expert who can work with the organization to understand its CMS needs and make specific recommendations. Scott Paley Abstract Edge www.abstractedge.com

@Scott Paley.. He didnt say it was free Scott, the author was offering suggestions for top CMS and social media tools - and clearly Drupal fits that title well. Which ever platform you go with, whether it's opensource, joomla, wordpress or 3rd party (such as Nstein), it's going to cost money to install, develop and maintain - thats a given - right?

My goal is to become less reliant on my web designer, ultimately. I hear that Drupal and Joomla can both be beastly for non-tech folk (like myself) to implement. What does Wordpress (which I presume is simpler?) lack that Joomla and Drupal have?

I agree with this, except Joomla! seems more popular than clickabilty. I've just written a post about what the word CMS actually means to different people: http://jonontech.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/the-cms-word-on-the-tweet/ Would like to know your thoughts.

@UtahSaint - I agree the author didn't say it was free. However, the headline suggested it was cheap. All I was saying was that while using an open source platform can end up having a lower total cost of ownership overall, and there are dozens of other good reasons to consider open source as well, that I would hope nobody is mislead into thinking that it would be inexpensive in most cases. In many cases you're still looking at tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for a fully customized implementation. I also agree that Drupal fits the bill as a top CMS tool to consider. But, I do think it's misleading to state that it's "by far the best solution for small publishers." IMO, it really depends.

Two important facets of choosing a content management system that were not addressed by this article are strategy and maintenance and support. By strategy, I mean that you need to think about all of the features you want your website to have and all of the services that you want it to provide before you choose a CMS. By maintenance and support, I mean that you need to consider who is going to do things like upgrade the software when required, add new features when needed, and provide training to the users who are going to use it.

Worth pointing out: Clickability is commercial. Drupal is at drupal.org, not drupal.com. (need to fix link.)

I'm surprised he's still in business. Kickapps and Lithium are jokes. It's all about keeping your own revenue. Who pays thousands a month for hosted forums and platforms? Try doing it yourself. There are plenty of open source solutions out there that can do community without carving yet another piece of miniscule CPMs to other clowns.

@ScottPaley: Scott, DPCI does implement Drupal solutions, but we also implement Joomla, Day Communique, SharePoint and other solutions. We have also been asked to do formal procurement sessions for companies looking at a wide range of products. In my view, Drupal is the best fit for the financial strictures of small publishers. If I retired tomorrow, I'd still say the same. Since you are affiliated with The Plone Foundation, does that mean your opinion on top CMS should be taken with a grain of salt? I'd listen carefully, but mostly because you are a fellow Brown grad (as well as someone that has interesting opinions I'd want to hear). @Jon (last name): I don't mind being disagreed with, but if you're going to make fun of my last name as well as attack me, you should think about using your own last name and your affiliation. Making blanket statements like Kickapps and Lithium are jokes is easy to do when you're anonymous. How about identifying yourself so we can get down to it? WRT those two products, I don't resell them, I have no financial interest in either product. I have noticed that a number of small publishers in the past 6-9 months want to get community sites up rapidly and they're going this route. This is a short cut. I AGREE with you that ceding already-small ad revenues is shortsighted if you can't pay the monthly hosting costs of those two solutions. However, for a quick fix (which is what some of these companies are trying to do), if you've got the monthly fee (ranging around a few thousand dollars) and if you pay attention to the legal agreement you sign to ensure you retain ownership of all content on that community site, you can migrate away once (if) you implement your own platform. My pick would be Drupal Organic Groups module, but as you say, there are other open-source solutions out there that people should explore. By the way, that customer for which we integrated Lithium, we actually helped them port away data from that solution to an in-house community solution that they implemented. Was a pretty straightforward migration, minimal if any technical issues. @DanRomanchik, I like what you have to say -- I was a little skittish about participating in this article since I knew that a 'top-3' for either was going to look like this was the short-list. Picking any software platform should ALWAYS be preceded by careful requirements analysis, along with looking at what kind of technologies you can support, what your infrastructure can bear, and what kind of vendor and support team you need. I like what you wrote about strategy, maintenance and support. With regard to this article, I never said in the interview that these solutions would be cheap or cost only thousands. If anyone has just a few thousand to spend, they'll go to a SaaS model solution like Clickability (again, I have no business affiliation with that company either, @Scott). For a more customized implementation of Drupal (or Joomla or Plone, etc), those solutions can cost in the tens of thousands for the technical implementation alone. In comparing that to the hundreds of thousands of dollars companies have spent in the past on proprietary CMS platforms, that is RELATIVELY inexpensive.

@Scott: I believe you are blowing things way out of proportion. I have never seen a "small publisher" spend "hundreds of thousands" of dollars on a Drupal site. That is outlandish. There are enterprise Drupal installations out there that cost less than $5000 to install, theme, and launch, and I know of at least one that did that in under a week. (http://quickbase.intuit.com/resources) That is obviously not the norm, however I think you must consider that it _can_ absolutely cost a small publisher nothing but time, and the ability to follow install instructions, to do a great many things. One example is http://couleeregiononline.com/ where the author put together an entire community site, knowing, as I understand it, not much about the web at all. Today, she happens to be an excellent contributor to Drupal as well as managing her sites. There are other examples, however the point is that Drupal is amazingly flexible off the shelf, can have any number of combination of modules installed to accomplish pretty much anything you can dream of from creating a something like flickr, twitter, basecamp, or even youtube, to doing your basic blog or advanced forum. None of these take a professional to setup, no code, and really, not even that much time. On the topic of design, tell me _anything_ that requires a custom design that won't require a designer? I don't believe we have created an automatic designer yet, though Drupal, and for that matter Wordpress, have literally thousands of themes that can be dropped in. Also, Drupal has in many of their themes, the ability to colorize or alter the theme directly from the admin section. If you are talking about time or cost to implement a custom design onto a Drupal or Wordpress install, I think you will find creating the single page template, info file, and CSS file necessary for a Drupal theme will be a bit easier than the, what is it now, 5 template files, that are required for a Wordpress theme. My last though on this part are that yes, you can spend lots of money to create large or custom sites that include functionality and design that you can't find off the shelf in the 4400+ modules and themes, however I believe the functionality you _will_ find there are more than enough for most small publishers needs. @Jon - Did you read his last suggestion, Drupal with Organic Groups? He DID give a very very good free suggestion, however he compared it with two known (from your scorn of those products, I can tell they are at least known to you) products that compete in that market. Seems reasonable to me. @Dan - Strategy, meaning all of the features? Drupal, as I said, has 4400+ modules, which cover just about every individual scratch you can think of, and if you come up with a new one, writing your own module to cover it is just plain easier than on other platforms. Support? Drupal, as far as I know, is the only OSS CMS that has a strong company offering commercial support up through the enterprise level, Acquia. Am I biased? Yes, I have developed web sites in Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, ecommerce in ZenCart, OSC, Magento (as well as a module and two themes for Magento, what a pain), and yes, I work exclusively on Drupal projects now, as I found it the cheapest to implement, easiest to theme, and best platform to develop additional functionality on, as well as having just a metric butt-ton of people who are willing, no downright fervently eager, to help me out. Also, I make things with Drupal because it is fun, a lot of fun.

Hi all. I'm graphic designer and some times i have to make some small web site. I have a basic knowledge of HTML and JavaScrip. I'm tying to find the best solution for me in using some CMS!!! If anyone can tell me what's the right one! Thank You! D.

@Pat: I think we can agree that the majority of such projects for small publishers would not run over $100k (though depending on the level of customization, new functionality, design work, etc. it's certainly possible), but as I wrote earlier, "In many cases you're still looking at tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for a fully customized implementation." Can we agree that it usually will run in the tens of thousands of dollars? You said there are $5,000 "enterprise" installations. Can you please define "enterprise" for me in this context? I have a feeling I don't define it the same as you do. As for using an existing theme rather than designing your own - that's an example of what I was talking about originally when I wrote, "and modify the look-and-feel in only the most superficial ways, costs can be kept to a minimum." Sure - if your organization has not invested lots of time and money into a overall brand identity you might be willing to use an existing template (yes, there are many perfectly nice ones). And yes, that would save you a whole lot of $. I think a lot of the cost considerations also come to how much traffic you're expecting. A site that serves 100k pages each month is a very different animal from one that serves 5 million, or 50 million. I will agree with your assertion that it is possible for a small publisher with relatively small publishing needs who wants a nice looking site and has no need for a customized design, and has mostly generic functional needs, and does not have an extensive internal operational consideration nor integration issues to consider (or complex workflow) can create such a site for less than $10k. But, those aren't typically the organizations I've personally worked with.

@Joe: I will respond shortly on your personal blog. The formatting here is too difficult to deal with...

I am seeking a CMS for my association's membership-based magazine. We have a print circulation of more than 50,000, but of course we're looking to expand, and deploying a more robust magazine Web site is a top priority. I've found a Gartner CMS study (http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/oracle/article31/article31.htm...) that lists several great options for us, but they are all fairly expensive. I am looking for someone who is using a CMS they like to give me some insight. Here are a few top desires: Comprehensive archive and search functionality; a way to provide member-only content in addition to "free" content; Web 2.0 such as comment-posting tools, RSS, Share capabilities, etc; and multi-media capabilities. So far I personally love Ektron--but since we want at least three domains, that would run us at least $15,000. I know that our CEO would prefer we find something in the $1,000 or less range. I have my suspicions that a CMS at that price will not offer all that we need now or in the future. I'd love to know what CMS Folio uses and how much it cost. Folio has a lot of the content features that's on our wish list. Does anyone out there have any good suggestions? I plan to investigate the WCMS sites mentioned in this article, but I have my doubts that it's what I'm looking for. Any advice from veterans of this process would be greatly appreciated.

I am really biased towards drupal, its a really stable good system that does pretty much everything I ask it to do. I use it for a calendaring / registration system, search engine front end for apache solr search, video hosting site for my university, and all kinds of other sites. It is a pain to theme somewhat and it has a lot of options that can make getting all the details right seem like a herculean feat, but in the end it does them. My personal opinion is that the Drupal CMS has legs, its going to be around for a while, there are so many sites moving to it, so it has good momentum that I hope is going to last a long time (hopefully). I am looking into Django because I think there are some real advantages to python and a hybrid approach between building it from scratch and downloading and customizing. Django might be the best approach for a developer that wants something custom and focused on a particular function. I think Django might be good for a lot of different scenarios, if your a developer. Also the Drupal community is very large, supportive, and help is just so easy to find online. I mean most problems I have are usually solved and documented somewhere online. Its not perfect, there are some things that I don't like the fact there is very little support for "data" fields like user registrations for events, in contrast to all the "cool" things you can do with users, nodes and taxonomy. However, Drupal 7 might begin to address this with fields in core (I hope). I will agree with some of the posters that you should use the right tool for the job. So... My edict is... Wordpress for primarily blog like sites and ones that don't have huge feature sets. Joomla is probably good for content sites and for people that want a wide selection of themes to download. However, if you got the time and/or the money to put together a Drupal site, its probably going to allow you to have many more options down the road and right now. Drupal is great because it is a leading technology that lots of people and companies contribute plugins / modules that do cool things or integrate the latest technology fairly quickly (unless you can build it yourself) I mean, have you seen the cck/views modules run by someone that knows what they are doing, it is SICK!.... If you have had to program with Drupal and "get to understand it" you will be amazed at how truly impressive the API is because of the documentation primarily. By the way $1000 for a CMS site is really about as silly as those guys that got busted at Yellowstone for peeing in Old Faithful, for $1000 you might want to consider using blogger or google sites or something (just kidding :) ). $1000 bucks isn't that much and for $15,000 from the Ektron your probably just looking at the license. TO be honest I would get some good hungry developers to take a "Theme" job for $10,000 and stick to the modules provided by Acquia. I don't work for acquia (commercial drupal) but I think their service plans are fairly priced for the most part and their distribution that contains the "must have" modules is sufficient to do most thing that you might need to do. They even let you download their distribution and so sticking with it will at least ensure that acquia is going to maintain what you download, until the company goes out of business (if they ever do), which is the same problem with any commercial software. So... Get about $10,000 from you cheap CEO, can you really be called a CEO if your trying to buy a cms for $1000? Anyway, get that money and go get some developer to customize you some Drupal, Wordpress, or god help you Joomla. Just kidding, I hear wonderful things about Joomla. But I really want someone to tell me seriously what they are. Love Peeps and out, Kdawg

I am really biased towards drupal, its a really stable good system that does pretty much everything I ask it to do. I use it for a calendaring / registration system, search engine front end for apache solr search, video hosting site for my university, and all kinds of other sites. It is a pain to theme somewhat and it has a lot of options that can make getting all the details right seem like a herculean feat, but in the end it does them. My personal opinion is that the Drupal CMS has legs, its going to be around for a while, there are so many sites moving to it, so it has good momentum that I hope is going to last a long time (hopefully). I am looking into Django because I think there are some real advantages to python and a hybrid approach between building it from scratch and downloading and customizing. Django might be the best approach for a developer that wants something custom and focused on a particular function. I think Django might be good for a lot of different scenarios, if your a developer. Also the Drupal community is very large, supportive, and help is just so easy to find online. I mean most problems I have are usually solved and documented somewhere online. Its not perfect, there are some things that I don't like the fact there is very little support for "data" fields like user registrations for events, in contrast to all the "cool" things you can do with users, nodes and taxonomy. However, Drupal 7 might begin to address this with fields in core (I hope). I will agree with some of the posters that you should use the right tool for the job. So... My edict is... Wordpress for primarily blog like sites and ones that don't have huge feature sets. Joomla is probably good for content sites and for people that want a wide selection of themes to download. However, if you got the time and/or the money to put together a Drupal site, its probably going to allow you to have many more options down the road and right now. Drupal is great because it is a leading technology that lots of people and companies contribute plugins / modules that do cool things or integrate the latest technology fairly quickly (unless you can build it yourself) I mean, have you seen the cck/views modules run by someone that knows what they are doing, it is SICK!.... If you have had to program with Drupal and "get to understand it" you will be amazed at how truly impressive the API is because of the documentation primarily. By the way $1000 for a CMS site is really about as silly as those guys that got busted at Yellowstone for peeing in Old Faithful, for $1000 you might want to consider using blogger or google sites or something (just kidding :) ). $1000 bucks isn't that much and for $15,000 from the Ektron your probably just looking at the license. TO be honest I would get some good hungry developers to take a "Theme" job for $10,000 and stick to the modules provided by Acquia. I don't work for acquia (commercial drupal) but I think their service plans are fairly priced for the most part and their distribution that contains the "must have" modules is sufficient to do most thing that you might need to do. They even let you download their distribution and so sticking with it will at least ensure that acquia is going to maintain what you download, until the company goes out of business (if they ever do), which is the same problem with any commercial software. So... Get about $10,000 from you cheap CEO, can you really be called a CEO if your trying to buy a cms for $1000? Anyway, get that money and go get some developer to customize you some Drupal, Wordpress, or god help you Joomla. Just kidding, I hear wonderful things about Joomla. But I really want someone to tell me seriously what they are. Love Peeps and out, Kdawg

CMS can be a tricky animal. I have seen what can happen when an internal IT firm tries to integrate a CMS. Not just by professional affiliation with www.oshyn.com - but by my own personal experience - I think many companies should consider using a company familiar with the complexities and challenges involved. There is no one-size-fits-all in CMS, it really depends on what your current and future needs are.

I would vouch for Wordpress anytime! It's not only a great blogging software, it makes for a wonderful CMS! With the amount of plugins and contributions worldwide, there's no end to the functions it can do for your online projects.