Most major organizations that have websites which I am aware of either already have a content management system (CMS) in place for their site, or or quickly moving toward adopting one. As Thomas Friedman notes in “The World is Flat” however, in our new information environment the big can act small and the small can act big. If you have a website and are not looking at CMS options, you should be.
Plone (http://plone.org) is one free, open source CMS system that is highly touted by my friend Miguel Guhlin. Last night I learned about another one thanks to David Warlick’s podcast, he is using it on the updated version of his personal website.
Again this is a free, open source tool: Mambo (www.mamboserver.com). I love Mambo’s website slogan: “Power in Simplicity.”
I am going to be checking this out soon and possibly making a transition myself. Dreamweaver is nice, especially using design templates, but the power of CMS systems (and especially the lure of attractive, powerful ones that are FREE) is huge. David is using an inexpensive theme from Pixelthemes which also looks like it is worth checking out (www.pixelthemes.com).
Apparently there has been a split among the developers of Mambo, I am not sure what the specifics are, but some have created a new CMS system (also open source” called “Joomla” (www.joomla.org). The name Joomla!
is a derived from the Swahili word Jumla, which means ‘all together’ or ‘as a whole’ (reference)
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