CMS Security Handbook: The Comprehensive Guide for WordPress®, Joomla!®, Drupal™, and Plone®

Choosing an Appropriate CMS for Your Needs

You may not necessarily share that same passion for a particular software (or hardware) platform that seems to be the status quo of open source projects and their fans. Although acknowledging the passion that the developers and the community bring to each of these is good, the passion for your business should supersede that.

You should view CMSs just as what they are — tools. Take a look at each CMS addressed in this book and choose the one that best helps you achieve your business goals. Making a list of the features and functions you need, as well as the skills you have to manage the solution, can help you with that choice. Each of the CMSs covered in this book can help you solve the goal of getting your business on the web. For that matter, a high school student could do the same thing by building an HTML page. But is that what you really want?

The real key is what you want the platform to do for you. What business goal will it solve? Start there, and make the right business decisions for the project software you choose.

Making the Right Business Decisions

The first business decision you must make is defining what your site is being built to do. Is it a corporate brochure site? Is it an e-commerce site? Will your solution need live customer service chat capabilities? Identifying the purpose of your site will lead you to a number of other questions. Asking these questions first will guide your design choices.

Secondly, you must consider ...