Wordpress
Benefits
- Suitable for simple content informational sites, blogs and standard professional sites.
- Fast to set up sites
- Large community supporting it and updating the code.
- Open source and widely used across the web.
- Good for very simple ecommerce (1-3 products)
Issues
- Not suitable for regular or advanced e-commerce projects, but can integrate with magento to overcome problem. There is an ecommerce plugin wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-e-commerce/, though the functionality is limited, so it may not be sufficient for the client (depending on the client’s demands)
- Must update it to keep it secure
- Not good for customized sites with complex user generated features (i.e. can’t build facebook on it)
- Not good for large media files
- Plugs-ins may get broken with updates (so extra maintenance is required for wordpress sites with plugins)
Magento
Benefits
- Open source ecommerce solution
- Has robust number of features with default functionality
- Excellent SEO capabilities
- Supports multiple languages (namely localization)
- Works with variety of payment systems and shipping vendors
Issues
- Bulky, slow, and very resource consuming. Runs very slow on shared hosting and needs to be on at least virtual or dedicated hosting.
- Only the standard feature is free and for the more robust features there is a yearly licensing fee.
- It may not be possible to customize the on the product and checkout pages (select drop-downs). It is also recommended for the designers to pay attention to the way default Magento pages look like at demo.magentocommerce.com/ and include the corresponding elements into the design. This becomes more actual if the client has limited budget and needs only standard functionality.
Drupal
Benefits
- Open source and widely used
- For simple Informational Sites and Corporate Sites
- Many modules and extensions which allows the site to be built for any functionality
- Large community of developers supporting and innovating
- Fast to set up
- Can be strong in SEO
Issues
- Not the most user-friendly content-management-system. Its very complex and any client that asks for it should review it first.
- Is not ideal for ecommerce websites. Allows ecommerce module integration (Ubercart), though a thorough investigation is required to make sure all the client’s needs can be met.
- Forms customization is problematic, default look is recommended (a note to designers).
- The information submitted via the forms is not stored in the admin panel by default, it’s sent to the corresponding admin’s email
- There is a learning curve for developers not familiar with it.
- It has limits in displaying data taken dynamically from other places on the site or from external sources.
Web Modulite: BFM Proprietary CMS
Benefits
- Customizable for any required solution and complex feature
- Fast, robust and scalable
- Great for complex social network sites or customized ecommerce sites
- Can handle large numbers of database inquiries at once
- Effortless to integrate with third party solutions
- The most user friendly content management system
- Excellent solution for implementing of highly loaded systems (social networks, content sites, informational portals etc.)
Issues
- Custom built so it takes more time to develop.
- Although its build on an open source framework, it is not open source to be used by the public.
- Outside developers aren’t familiar with the back-end and there will be a learning curve
Conclusion
The down-side of all CMS other than ours are the following:
- They were developed by third-parties– we have less ability to customize any features that clients wish to function outside of the standard settings.
- Even when customization is possible, this often requires the use of plug-ins or additional third-parties, thus these systems are not optimized for highly-customized online presences.
- Maintenance can be difficult and more time-consuming – we are not as familiar with these systems and therefore development / troubleshooting / future adjustments take much longer.
- Main downside is that these systems are limited in terms of customizations – these are only good solutions for clients who do not have a lot of money and also want a very straightforward website with basic functions. Any clients who wish to have highly-customized online solutions should go with our system because our system is scalable for usability.
With our CMS, I would be very careful of saying it can do anything. We have a great CMS but it is still very basic at this point and requires a great deal of customization to perform many advanced/customized functions. However, there are several huge benefits of our system which are:
- We are not bound by plug-ins or third-party coding in terms of customization; we can customize the CMS in very innovative ways (however custom functions must be built from the ground-up)
- Our system is a much better solution for online businesses who foresee their sites or their business model changing frequently or significantly over time – this is a better model for new/newer business ventures where clients have decent starting budgets; it allows for the most scalability moving forward.
- Our team built this system, so we know all of its quirks and are much more nimble in terms of training and troubleshooting.
