Drupal and Joomla! - Content Management Systems For Web Sites

Setting up web sites has been an effective way for groups and organizations to publish information to the world. A click on a link is typically all it takes for somebody to access that information. Maintaining that information however is not quite as simple, especially if more than one person provides content and makes updates to the web site.

Therefore, various tools, called content management systems (CMS), have been developed to simplify this process. In particular web based content management tools provide a convenient and effective way for groups of people to collaboratively work on a web site, even if they are spread out geographically all over the globe.

The open source software package Drupal has emerged as a popular tool for organizations and individuals to maintain their websites. Besides putting up web pages for personal or corporate web sites, the software includes functionality to run discussion sites, intranet applications, blogs (weblogs), e-commerce applications, and social networking sites. Add-on modules are available for podcasting, collaborative authoring, newsletters, and file transfer.

Another popular open source content management system is Joomla!. Like Drupal, the software can be downloaded and used free of charge. It is implemented in PHP and MySQL and includes many useful features such as blogs, forums, searching, calendars and polling. It uses advanced technology for performance enhancements and security.

A system with similar functionality, but slightly more focussed on web portal setup and management, is XOOPS, which can be used to quickly set up and manage a wide variety of web sites, such as community web sites, company web portals, intranets, and blogs.

The remaining widely used open source CMS for dynamic web sites is Mambo. It boasts over 5 million downloads since 2001 and has received various prestigious awards.