Of course on some occasions you have heard or said the word CMS, and you still don’t know for sure what it means. As you may know, the full form of CMS is Content Management System. According to the technical definition, we call the software CMS by which it is possible to manage different content of a website (audio, video, image, text or much more). When you decide to set up an ecommerce store, this term is very present in most conversations.
In a nutshell, CMS is a system that you can use to create any kind of blog, e-commerce or website without coding or programming. This will work even if you do not have detailed knowledge about web development. But if you have some idea about web development, then you can create great websites using CMS.
Many people use CMS to create their website, where it is used not only for “normal” web pages, but also for a blog, an ecommerce, etc. For any page that requires constant updates, these tools are the most useful. You can search for different types of CMS depending on the page: here for blogs, for corporate pages, for ecommerce, for multimedia content.
Feature-rich websites without coding can now be easily created with CMS, so its use is on the rise. Learn about the 6 most used, open source and free CMS.
- WordPress
- Joomla
- Ghost
- Magento
- Drupal
- Moodle
WordPress
WordPress is the most popular free and open source CMS software. So PHP as the main programming language and MySQL and MariaDB for databases have been used. It is currently the most used CMS software.
WordPress is used so much that it is used in the CMS sector at about 63.3%. Also, 36.3% of the total websites we make by WordPress. You are reading this article, but it is for the benefit of WordPress. The contribution of WordPress is behind this website.
To make the work of WordPress easier, the WordPress directory has more than 7,500 themes and more than 56,000 free and freemium plugins. The exact number of themes and plugins outside of the WordPress directory depends on an approximate number.
Joomla
Joomla is another popular free open source content management system developed by PHP. It accounts for about 4.1% of the CMS world.
August 17, 2005 Miro International Pvt. Ltd. It is based on a CMS software called Mambo, a non-profit organization called The Joomla developers later created a website called OpenSourceMattrers.com (OSM) to provide various information about Joomla. It has over 8,000 free and paid extensions that will help you manage your web pages. Unlike other open source CMS platforms, it does not cost anything to use on your personal website.
Ghost
Ghost is a free and open source blogging platform built using Node JS (a JavaScript framework). It is designed to facilitate blogging and online publishing. You can download Ghost and install it on your server at no cost. But if you want to get their services including hosting from Ghost, you have to spend from 29 to 199 per month.
Magento
Magento is an open source e-commerce platform built on the PHP programming language. It is well known as an e-commerce platform. It is being distributed free of charge under the Open Software v3.0 license. Magento currently holds 1.3% of the total market share of CMS software.
Magento is used by e-commerce platforms like Land Rover, Cox & Cox, Timex, Sigma Beauty. You can take a free trial from them if you want.
Drupal
Drupal is an open source and free content management system / framework. It was developed by PHP and distributed under the GPL v2 license. About 2.3% of all websites worldwide use Drupal’s framework as a back-end. Drupal is famous for its customization benefits. Due to which the website is called Swiss Army knife for websites. Drupal currently holds 2.7% of CMS’s total market share.
The word Drupal is a variant of the Dutch word Druppel. In English it means Drop (as in a water droplet) or in Bengali water droplet. The reason behind giving the name is that the code of a website called drop.org was given to Drupal.
Moodle
Moodle CMS system is a learning management software. Which is distributed as a free and open source software under the GPL v3 license. People use Moodle in various educational activities including online classes, e-learning, flipped classrooms in different sectors including universities, schools, all over the world. In the current situation, the demand for e-learning is at its peak. And the demand for e-learning will continue to grow in the next world. Moodle in this category is the demand of the time. It was developed by Martin Dougiamas, a developer, to facilitate various online learning, including online courses.
Final Words
All the CMS software mentioned here occupy the lion’s share of open source and CMS market share. The market share statistics that we have shown are taken from the updated data till May, 2020. There are also some CMSs that are not open source and their market share is negligible.