“If a craftsman wants to do good work, he must first sharpen his tools.”

Content is everything to content marketers. A content marketer should know his tools so to perfect his work. In the followings, 5 main CMS tools will be analyzed and compared. Get ready for it!

WordPress

As a CMS, WordPress powers nearly 27 percent of the internet, the dominating force in the market. But is it right for you or does it meet content marketing needs? For websites that will be simple and for which the user doesn’t have a lot of tech experience, WordPress has some clear advantages. It has about 18 million users according to the analysis company BuiltWith and the largest user community.

Facts

• 18,000 extensions and over 14,000 free design templates
• “Five-minute installation” via Wizard
• Search engine friendly URLs
• Publishing and management tools for mobile solutions

System requirements for WordPress 4.9.4

• Webserver: Every server with PHP and MySQL/MariaDB support (recommended: Apache)
• Middleware: PHP 7.2 or higher
• Database: MySQL 5.6 or higher / MariaDB 10.0 or higher
• Hardware: The developer recommends a PHP memory limit of 32 MB or more
• Other recommendations: HTTPS support / For search engine friendly URLs, the Apache module mod_rewrite is required

Drupal

Drupal is much less popular among average website owners than WordPress, but it is very popular among developers. Why? In Drupal you can do almost anything right out of the box, which is just something that you can’t do with WordPress. But while WordPress is user-friendly (anyone can use WordPress), Drupal can be pretty difficult to get the hang of.

Drupal was made for fast performance. As a consequence, it is less hardware hungry than its competitors which is good news for server costs.

Facts

• Very flexible, modular layout
• Slim basic installation with more than 36,000 extension modules
• Focus on social publishing and community projects
• More than 1100 distributions as a complete solution for typical applications

System requirements for Drupal 8

• Webserver: Apache, Nginx, MS IIS, or any other webserver with PHP support
• Middleware: PHP 5.5.9 or higher
• Database: MySQL 5.5.3, MariaDB 5.5.20, Percona server 5.5.8 or higher (PDO requires an InnoDB-compatible storage engine); PostgreSQL 9.1.2 or higher (with PDO); SQLite 3.7.11 or higher

Zsite

Open source solutions are popular worldwide, so there is no exception to CMS tools. The success of these systems shows that open source products can hold their own against standard solutions when it comes to commercial website operation. Zsite has featured modules, such as article, product, forum, comment, member, blog, help. It is comprehensive and practical with a simple backend. It can also do SEO by keywords, summary, etc. so it can build a website that can be easily found by search engines.

Facts

• open source CMS with a large range of functions
• More than 1900 available extensions
• Multi-lingual backend
• Online demo

System requirements for Zsite 7.1

• Webserver: Apache/Nginx; iis is not recommended
• Middleware: PHP 5.2 with php5-curl,php5-json,php5-pdo,php5-gd; 5.4 is recommended
  
• Database: MySQL 4.0

Joomla!

Joomla is the second most popular CMS on the web. Its market share in the CMS market is 6.3 percent, on the entire Internet it powers 3.1 percent of all websites. This translates to roughly 58 million web presences. The software itself is free but you will likely have to pay for premium templates and/or extensions.

Facts

• Currently around 7400 available extensions
• Object-based content management
• Community support through forums

System requirements for Joomla! 3.x

• Webserver: Apache HTTP Server 2.0 (2.4 recommended) with mod_mysql, mod_xml, and mod_zlib; Nginx 1.8 or higher; MS IIS 7
• Middleware: PHP 5.6 (7.0 or higher recommended)
• Database: MySQL 5.1 with InnoDB support (5.5.3 or higher recommended); MS SQL server 10.50.1600.1 (10.50.1600.1 or higher recommended); PostgreSQL 8.3.18 (9.1 or higher recommended), MariaDB 5.1 (or higher)

Reference

1. https://pepperlandmarketing.com/blog/pros-and-cons-of-popular-cms-for-content-marketers/

2. https://www.1and1.com/digitalguide/hosting/cms/cms-comparison-a-review-of-the-five-best-platforms/