CMS

It was a startling introduction to my LevelTen Interactive tenure.

Walking in with very little knowledge about Content Management Systems was a bit intimidating for a newbie at a Drupal shop.

Kayla quickly put LevelTen’s 2010 CMS Intelligence Report in my hands for a crash course on all things CMS-related.

If history has taught us anything (which, quite frankly, is questionable), it’s that the power of a good underdog should never be ignored. Time and time again, the “no one believed in us” card is applied to produce a shake-up at the top of a hierarchy.

I'm proud to announce that LevelTen Interactive is now an official Acquia Silver Partner.

Acquia, co-founded by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, provides products, services, and technical support for the Drupal content management system.

The team at LevelTen is extremely proud to be associated with one of the premier companies in the Drupal space.

If you missed the big news this weekend, WhiteHouse.gov has officially made the switch to using open source platform, Drupal as its content management system over the proprietary CMS platform that was in use before.

According to a great blog post by Nancy Scola at TechPresident:

In the very first episode of Speak Easy Drupal, the LevelTen staff compare and contrast a variety of content management systems. While the focus of this podcast is comparing Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla, attention is also given to open source vs. proprietary systems. You'll learn the differences between each CMS, strengths, differences, and when you should use each.

What's the Quick Takeaway?

The simple answer is that there isn't any. Each CMS has it's clear strengths and weaknesses. If you're looking for a quick answer, here's the lowdown:

Wordpress

Along with the adoption of Drupal as LevelTen’s recommended CMS/development framework, comes the need for best practices for Drupal design themes. Whether the design theme is pre-designed or is created from scratch, there are several things to keep in mind. LevelTen has some advice that can be extended to designers, developers, and management teams, when choosing a template or custom designing for Drupal or a similar CMS platform.

Download the Essentials distribution by clicking the link below.

The iSite Essentials CMS is a free open source Content Management System designed to enable organizations to build the ultimate Web 2.0 website. It is an extended distribution of the world’s most popular advanced open source CMS, Drupal. (If you are familiar with Drupal, you may want to click here to learn how iSE extends Drupal.)

WYSIWYG stands for "What You See Is What You Get", and describes a type of programming interface that allows a user to create stylized content without having to know any particular programming language.

A Content Management System or CMS, is a piece of software, such as Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla, which allows an end user to build a powerful, dynamic website with little to no custom programming. Websites built with a content management system are typically easy to update and make changes to.