GCW CMS List [Archive] - The Church Webmasters' Forum

JackWolfgang

Sat., Jan. 3, 2009, 1:02 pm

David, I am curious as to why the list of Content Management Systems (CMS) on the Great Church Websites site does not include WordPress (http://WordPress.org), Joomla (http://www.joomla.org/), Web Empowered Church (http://webempoweredchurch.com/), or Typo3 (http://typo3.com/) (or any number of other open source projects)? While these CMS software packages are not written specifically for churches, there are churches using them to run their web sites.

David Gillaspey

Sat., Jan. 3, 2009, 3:13 pm

Hi Jack,

You're referring to my list located here (http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/web_content_management_systems_vendor_directory.php).

This is a list of proprietary, that is, commercial, CMS products. (A few of these are actually based on open-source software such as Joomla or TYPO3, however.) There's a link in the introduction to this directory to an external site (http://opensourcecms.com) that lists many different open-source products and posts user reviews of these. The site also allows users to try every one of the open-source products listed on the site, for two hours. (Then the server is refreshed.)

There's no reason for me to duplicate the excellent work of this site. In particular, I could not duplicate the user reviews. Since open-source software is free, many people can, and have, tried a variety of open-source CMS products, so that, when they post a review of this product or that product, they really are able to compare the different open-source software that they've tried.

That's not going to work with commercial CMS software that churches have to pay for. If I had more time, which I don't (this is volunteer ministry), I would like to develop some comparisons of the different commercial CMS products. But my directory of CMS vendors at the moment includes 70 plus products. It would takes weeks of work to properly compare them, say in a chart of some sort.

The link to the external site was more obvious before 1 January 2009, when I launched the redesign of my site. Formerly, there was a graphic accompanying the link to the other site that was big enough to easily catch one's attention. I've now made some changes to the introduction so visitors won't overlook this link to the open-source CMS site, or the reason why they should visit the external site.