Choosing a CMS

What is a CMS?

A CMS is a Content Management System, usually scripts that lends you to administrate your website, update it, add content, etc; easier than if you were creating your pages with an HTML editor, like Macromedia DreamWeaver, Microsoft Front Page, Namo Web editor, and all that kind of web page editors.
Usually the Content Management Systems are PHP scripts, Perl or even ASP scripts, with a simple interface that lends you to do everything, starting from a simple web page saying Hello World, or a very complex site with a news system, board(forums), polls, members only pages, photo galleries, blogs, and more.
In other words, a Content Management System is a system for organising and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content.

Types of content management systems

There are several types of content management systems:

Web content management systems assist in automating various aspects of web publishing.
Transactional content management systems (T-CMS) assist in managing e-commerce transactions.
Integrated content management systems (I-CMS) assist in managing enterprise documents and content.
Publications management systems (P-CMS) assist in managing the publications (manuals, books, help, guidelines, references) content life cycle.
Learning management systems (L-CMS) assist in managing the web-based learning content life cycle.
Document imaging systems are also generally considered under the family of general content management.
Enterprise content management systems (E-CMS) vary in their functionality. Some support both the web and publications content life cycle, while others support the web content life cycle and either transactional content or customer relationship management content. The definition of AIIM for ECM includes methods and tools for "capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver" content across an enterprise. "Manage" contains components like document management, collaboration, business process management, records management, email management, workflow and web content management. The ECM concept is not restricted to web based technologies but includes client/server and host based solutions.

How to choose a Web CMS

The first thing that you have to keep in mind is where are you going to host your website, since the Content Management Systems are server-based scripts or applications, they can not run on any web hosting.
So what you need is a hosting that supports a scripting language, that can be PHP, since there are many content management systems written in PHP; and a database, like MySQL, but many CMS's now support almost any SQL based database, so they can work with other servers like MS SQL Server.
And the last thing you have to take care of, is the web server on which the CMS is able to work, since some of them require some specific functions from Apache Web Server, or from IIS, etc.

One step more before choosing, the price

Since not all the content management systems are free, nor open source; you have to decide if you want to pay for a CMS or you prefer to choose a free and maybe open source content management system. Prices? well, there are of all of them, starting from about $10 USD like PHP-Nuke, to others like Ektron, ADXStudio, ArticleLive, and many others content management systems.
Usually the price is based on the amount of websites you are going to setup, if it is going to be a heavy website, for example for a big enterprise who wants to sell it's products on the Internet, and even give support to the users.

Last step, choosing the Content Management System

Now that you have your requirements, you can take a look at the next lists, where you can find a lot of content management systems that can be free, open source, or that can be paid. On this last step you have to choose some other features that the CMS must have. So, you can take a look at a list of content management systems or you can compare some of them according to the features of each of them by checking the Comparison of content management systems, where you can compare some content management systems according to some of the next features, like: RSS feeds, if it has a WYSIWYG pages editor, caching support, and more.
Now that you know what to do you could also .