Picking the best CMS Solution, Easy to use OR Feature-Heavy?

Asked by Shaun MacDougall a freelance developer from San Diego

What, in your opinion, would be the best reason to choose a CMS like wordpress over an open source CMS like joomla? or vis versa?

In my experience systems like Joomla and Drupal scare clients

Feature heavy CMS systems can intimidate clients who hesitate to learn and use them.


Joomla Menu
The 3 level deep Joomla menus can confuse even the most web-savy users.

This entirely defeats the purpose of building with a CMS.
You will spend more time walking clients through the endless Joomla menus, then it would have taken for you to make the changes in raw HTML yourself. Since the point of Content Management Systems is to allow clients to manage and update the content themselves, it doesn’t make sense to pick a system that non web-savy users are reluctant to use.

For most websites a simple wordpress based CMS works great.

  • The menus don’t intimidate clients
  • Simple WYSIWYG editor makes content changes easy.
  • Themes are easy to design and build
  • Plugins are easy to install and use

But for certain solutions joomla/drupal are better suited, such as:

  • Extensible User Profiles: for membership sites and portals
  • Modifiying the Back-end: messing with the wordpress core is not recommended
  • E-Commerce: plugins exist but wordpress, just doesn’t perform as well as a dedicated cart system

In conclusion your clients and their needs will determine which CMS platform to use.
So pick a CMS that your clients will use without need for handholding.

p.s. Check out the WordPress vs. Drupal - Content Management Systems blog over at MakeUseOf.com