Choosing a CMS
Posted: April 20th, 2015After going through an evaluation process, we have chosen Drupal 7 as our CMS for the next iteration of the website CMS.
What is a CMS?
A content management system, or CMS for short, is a piece of software that supports publishing, editing and modifying web content using a central interface. It allows for non-technical users to have a better experience editing the website. We have been using a CMS since around 2008 when we first started using Drupal 5.
Our Process
In order to choose our next CMS, we first established evaluation criteria. Since one of our criteria was a desire to use a free, open-source system, we quickly ruled out commercial CMSs such as Cascade Server. That basically left us with a choice between Drupal and WordPress, as the two major free, open-source CMSs in use currently. We also have experience using previous versions of both of these software packages.
Our evaluation compared 20 criteria; things such as performance, browser support, editing experience, product maturity and security.
Why Drupal?
After applying the evaluation criteria to both WordPress and Drupal, we decided on Drupal for the following reasons:
- Content Migration: Since we currently use Drupal 5 as our main CMS, we anticipate that migrating our current content will be easier than switching to a different CMS such as WordPress.
- Queen’s Community Support: Drupal is much more widely used on campus for larger departmental websites. It would be beneficial to have the option of collaborating with the larger Queens’ community on issues such as security, cross-site content sharing, branding, etc.
- QUL Experience: Since we currently use Drupal 5 for our current public site, and Drupal 6 for StaffWeb, we already have a significant level of expertise using Drupal in the library.
- User Permissions: Drupal is an excellent choice where many users are editing a variety of content with different levels of associated permissions.
- Security: Drupal has a better reputation in terms of security.
While Drupal 8’s release is on the horizon, it is widely agreed that it is best to use Drupal 7 at this time because of its stability, and wealth of user-contributed modules and knowledge.
Featured Resource
It’s also comforting to know that many libraries (ourselves included) already use Drupal successfully! This week, we’d like to direct you to Drupal in Libraries by Kenneth J. Varnum:
Drupal, as an open source tool depends on community input to enhance its capabilities, and libraries large and small have shared code to accomplish typical tasks. Aimed at information professionals with some knowledge of website design and architecture, but programming skill is not required. You will learn to use Drupal as a toolset to manage web content, and as a web project manager, to rapidly customize the functionality you need
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