In the world today, when it comes to setting up a platform to create good content for audience of every kind for a particular niche, then blogging is no more news to a whole lots of people when it comes to creating such platforms.

These platforms involving sub domains to hosted domains are created using Content Management System (CMS). However, the best websites today are powered by easy to use content management systems (CMS) that allow you to make changes to a website without needing to touch any single line of code.

However, A CMS is not a website builder. A CMS is usually more sophisticated and much more technical. in other words it  is a steeper learning curve to building a Website.

If you want to get a website done without hiring a website developer or web designer, you have to consider the top three CMS, which are

1. WordPress
2. Drupal
3. Joomla!

Yes, this three. The question now could be are there not more other than this?. Yes, there are but these three tops this list with great number of user experience and they have a large community that can support you.

Now choosing from the top three can become a challenge here, because the three CMS are good enough to give you what you want. However, great and lovely sites which will know and come across in the word today are built using this three CMS.

Guiding you properly to getting the perfect CMS is what this review is all about. and I believe that at the end of this review, there is no way you are going to make any mistake using the wrong CMS to build the right content.

So let us see the various specifications they have to offer

— WORDPRESS —

This is the most popular CMS used for building websites. WordPress.com is a service built on-top of WordPress that tries to offer a website builder experience on top of the WordPress CMS— to mixed results.

WordPress.com is separated into two parts: My Site and WP Admin. My Site is beautiful but simple— it’s the part is the website builder. WP Admin is complex but more powerful. However, it is the part that is actually the CMS.

— DRUPAL —

The most complicated, but also the most powerful. It requires a familiar understanding of HTML, CSS and PHP.

Drupal became one of the most comprehensive CMS systems available. The script has a very specific programming environment, that could be described better as a programmer’s platform than a simple CMS script.

The script as an Open Source is chosen by many programmers who outgrew simpler scripts like Quick.Cms or WordPress.

The CMS can be downloaded and viewed at www.drupal.org

— JOOMLA! —

Joomla is an open-source content management system designed for developers with coding experience rather than beginners that are more dependent on website builders for creating web content.

When it comes to complexity, Joomla! places somewhere between simple WordPress and comprehensive and advanced Drupal.

The Open Source script is very popular among programmers who create even quite advanced websites with it.

CMS
Creator	Matt Mullenwegg	Forked	Dries Buy Taert
Date of Release	2003	2005	2001
Users	Over 140 million	Over 63 Million	Over 15 million
What this CMS says about themselves	WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog, we like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time	Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you build websites and powerful application. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular software available	Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) platform poering millions of websites and applications. Its build, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world
Cost	Free	Free	Free
Free Plugins	Over 45 Thousand	Over 6 Thousand	Over 35 Thousand
Free Themes	Over 4 thousand	Over 1 Thousand	Over 2 thousand
Top site Using This
Easy to Install	Yes	Yes	Yes
Navigation management	Easy	Fair	Complex
Updates	Yes	Yes	Yes
Advanced administration
Level of skills needed
Best USED FOR	Blogs, Corporative Websites, Small – Medium Sized Website	E-Commerce, Social Networking site	Used for All

Whats CMS is best based on User Experience?

— WORDPRESS —

WordPress is a free platform initially developed to build blogs, which is however used now as a content management system for creating websites. A large number of users choose WordPress as a solution when setting up a website due to easy to use advantages of the platform; these advantages, however, are in some case not properly understood.

With it’s humble blogging beginnings, WordPress has taken the world by storm (literally), powering over over 60 millions websites today.

With the level and extent, it has gone so far with its easy to use user experience. The WordPress therefore leads the word do it yourself CMS

— ADVANTAGES—

1. Easy to Use.  With the User Interface of WordPress Alone, you already know what to do to start creating your content for publication on your website. You can make changes to the website yourself without having to know any HTML coding.  Adding pages, blog posts, products, images and editing current content is easy on WordPress. 
2. Cost or no Cost site Building.  WordPress offers a huge variety of themes with features you can use to build the website.  With thousands of sample theme they have, you get to choose the one that suit your needs and this makes the work easier for you to work on. When you begin with a theme, you cut down significantly on the amount of time it takes to build a website the costs).
3. Customizable – WordPress has significantly more plug-ins and other customizations available than any other CMS. Because of its widespread popularity, more third-party designers and developers will create free (or relatively inexpensive) new WordPress tools to help you create/start a blog that looks like a high-dollar custom website. The cost is however, below $100.
4. Search Engine Optimization. WordPress offers several great search engine optimization tools that make doing your own on-site SEO simple. Example which is the All in One SEO.
5. Community Support – If you do experience issues or have questions about your new WordPress site, you can easily tap into the millions of people already using and supporting it. Their support forum includes helpful contributors that can answer any question you might have, within minutes which is also for free.
6. E-commerce Availability.  If you have a product, you which to manage, then “Woo commerce” is an e-commerce plugin on WordPress to build your desirable e-commerce websites.  As an e-commerce store, you will often find yourself updating your products, pricing, sales, coupons and more. 

— DISADVANTAGES —

1. Updates – updating the system is critical to close security holes that may pop up. However, since each WordPress site includes countless different plugins, updating the system can damage certain plugins not adapted to the new system. Basically, the site will then be at the mercy of the programmer who wrote the plugin – and will show in a sub-optimal way until repaired
2. Most Plugins Not Updated: In as much as WordPress keep getting updated, most of the plugins are not updated to be tested with the new upgrade, which can make a website not to perform at its best.
3. Content doesn’t always look right. When you make updates to your site yourself through the visual tab, it doesn’t always flow the way you expected it to when looking in the actual browser.  This can leave those not knowing HTML frustrated when they try to get text and images to appear the way they want.  However, it is still cheaper to have your web designer fix those few style issues you need done rather than having to send them a list of changes you need done every time you update your site.
4. Makes Large Users Depend on Plugins: Because of the large plugins that WordPress contains. It serves as temptation to many users. Making them depend on plugins which increases their love for much usage for plugins. However, the higher the plugins they use the more their website slows down when loading up a page
5. Customization of a theme can be costly. If the website was built upon a theme and you decide that you want to make major changes to it.  It may be time consuming to have a programmer make changes to the layout of the theme. Every theme is programmed differently and therefore the programmer must first familiarize themselves with the way each individual theme was programmed before making the changes.  If you anticipate needing to make major changes to the theme, consider having a theme built from scratch to meet your needs instead.

— JOOMLA! —

When it comes to being complicated, Joomla! places somewhere between simple WordPress and comprehensive and advanced Drupal.

Joomla is a good CMS choice for web designers with enough experience coding to create a unique and professional business website.

Joomla is an open-source content management system designed for developers with coding experience rather than beginners that are more dependent on website builders for creating web content. With a broad selection of commerce and business add-ons, Joomla is decent choice for companies looking to step up their basic website to something more appealing, unique, interactive and professional.

— ADVANTAGES—

1. Easy to install: Joomla! is quite simple to install. It takes only about ten minutes from downloading to having a working script on a server. It is not as easy as WordPress, but is still much simpler than Drupal.
2. Free Plugins: The CMS also have thousands of free plugins available at the homepage. Although WordPress have more. It also has Social media pages
3. Good security Measures: The security measures available with Joomla help protect your important content during any interactions with your site visitors. Captcha ensures that contributors sending information are human rather than machine, while being SSL compatible gives you the option to password protect sensitive pages and content.
4. Support: There is abundance of programmer’s tools and tutorials available for users. There’s also an extensive discussion board.
5. Navigation management: The Joomla creative dashboard is simple and intuitive, which is good since this CMS doesn’t have many support options. You can browse through the online user guide and discuss options on the user forums.
6. Advanced administration: Administration panel provides many functions that can be a bit complicated in the beginning. But with time you get to get used to it and master most of the script.

— DISADVANTAGES —

1. Not Good for Beginners: Because of its complexity in term of limited adjustment options, Joomla! Which has many modules and templates, is not simplified as WordPress.
2. Server resources and efficiency: Modularity and expendability often means bigger demands on server parameters. This certainly is the case. Still, if the website is not too large and there will not be thousands of visitors, there should be no problems, at least not in the beginning.
3. Paid plugins: Some of plugins and modules for Joomla! are paid, unlike for e.g. WordPress or Drupal. It pays to spend some time to make sure you won’t have to buy an addition that is free in some other script.
4. Plugins compatibility: There may occur some frustrating compatibility issues between some of the plugins. It may turn out that it will be impossible to get some functionalities without some serious work on the PHP code.
5. Little community size: since Joomla users are not as vast as WordPress the community support cants be as effective as that of WordPress

— DRUPAL —

Drupal is a very good choice for any user that require a powerful, robust, extensible. Also it is an open sourced CMS system that has no licensing fees.  It allows for complex data structures and efficient site performance.  provides much greater performance and is easier use when modeling complex data structures and relationships than another free CMS like WordPress.

Drupal became one of the most comprehensive CMS systems available. The script has a very specific programming environment, that could be described better as a programmer’s platform than a simple CMS script.

The script as an Open Source is chosen by many programmers who outgrew simpler scripts like Quick.Cms or WordPress.

— ADVANTAGES —

Content management. Content management is perhaps the strongest part of Drupal. You can easily create and place your content anywhere on your website, reuse and aggregate it in many different ways.

1. Includes a lot of functionality

Drupal includes lot of functionalities like: advanced menu management, polls management, graphics modification tool, user’s management and much more. These functions make it possible to create simple or advanced websites, blogs, discussion boards, social networking pages, etc.

2. Variety of content types

Drupal is famous for allowing to create and manage many content types, like: videos, polls, user management, text, blogs, podcasts, statistics, and others.

3. Graphics management

The script includes capabilities of design elements editing. Available templates and themes make for a good start. Predefined page functions configurations make it easy to create both a simple as well as more complicated page configurations.

4. Plugins

The script has several thousands of plugins available on its website. Since Drupal is an Open Source, you can use as well as create your own plugins and make modification to the development of other people plugins.

5. Databases

Drupal is a great choice for building an online database. It has great tools for creating advanced data structures out of the box. With help of a few contributed modules the possibilities are limitless.

Being a content management system in the first place Drupal is a perfect platform for websites – large to small. It’s extendable with more than 12,000 open source modules that can do almost anything. There is a famous answer to almost any question in Drupal community – “there is a module for that”.

— DISADVANTAGES —

1. Complicated script: The script is not very user-friendly and requires advanced knowledge to install and modify. Quick.Cms, WordPress and even Joomla are simpler to use, even though they do not offer functionalities as rich as Drupal does.
2. Not easy to navigate: Drupal’s admin section, especially before Drupal 8, can be fairly confusing to navigate. This is tough for developers as well as content authors.
3. Initial setup can be pain
4. Drupal have planty of new solutions: If you’re used to older systems, getting used to this script will take some time.
5. Efficiency: When considering scalibility and efficiency, Drupal is far behind other scripts like Quick.Cms or WordPress. If your website is very large, the script will generate a big server load. It is caused by the big range of possibilities provided by Drupal. There are however plugins that load a website to the server’s cache, what decreases the server load.
6. For development the learning curve can seem steep: Because it’s such a robust system that offers so much in terms of capabilities, it may take a while to get a full handle on everything.
7. Drupal seems to require more regular maintenance than other systems.

— MY RECOMMENDATIONS —

All the CMS are wonderful and good and it depends on what you want to achieve with it.

However,  My recommendation comes in two phases

— 1ST PHASE —

If you are just starting, I recommend that you start with WordPress to get yourself familiar with CMS. Use your WordPress to work on your content and make sure you have enough content that can expose your brand to a lager audience.

— 2ND PHASE —

I’ll be honest, forget about Joomla, after you gotten yourself familiarized with WordPress. Then face Drupal for a more advance and more better and vast content.

Having said all this, I like WordPress, the site your are viewing is built on WordPress. And I am currently working on my Other site using Drupal with its design writing in HTML 5 and vast Database management.

Thanks.

Your Pal,

Yudee.