In the first article in this series we covered WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, and b2evolution, five leading Content Management Systems.

In this article we talk about the next five: Xoops, Seotoaster, e107, Concrete5, and Typo3.

6. Xoops

Xoops (eXtensible Object Orientated Portal System) is an open source and ideal tool to develop small to large dynamic community web sites, corporate portals, web logs and much more. It is a dynamic object oriented portal script that is written in PHP and it supports MySQL. Easy to use, Xoops is an ideal tool to create data-driven community sites of all sizes. It is used for blogs, corporate intranet sites and content-rich information portals.

Advantages of Xoops:

• Small learning curve
• Easy installation
• Addition of features to your website can be done easily through additional modules and themes
• It has worldwide support available in a number of languages
• Administrator can easily find users based on a variety of criteria.  Using a simple template-based system, he can send both emails and private messages
• Using a theme-based template system, Xoops allows instant enhancing of the presentation of your site
• Search Engine Friendly: Xoops supports many add-ons to help make your site more search engine-friendly
• Theme capability
• Worldwide Support

Disadvantages:

• A provider should be equipped with the Apache web server, PHP and an SQL database, preferably MySQL
• It requires installation of a number of modules and some of the documents for some modules are lacking. Because of this, it becomes time consuming for administrators to tweak these modules to get them to work.

7. Seotoaster

SEO Toaster is a free open source CMS and e-commerce software used by many big and small businesses. The powerful CMS is very light on resource usage. It represents an alternative to Yahoo Stores for small e-commerce websites or WordPress when used as a corporate or affiliate CMS. Featured with a unique architecture, the powerful CMS makes piloting SEO execution. It also helps in easy marketing for multiple websites from a central automated web marketing location. Seotoaster requires a single core to power and revise multiple websites hosted on the same server.

Advantages:

• Provides ability to access a library of ready-to-use themes to jump-start your presence online
• Customize and integrate open source shopping cart and other applications
• Building one, two and more money-making websites for free is possible with SEO Toaster
• SEO friendliness: In-built all latest SEO techniques right into their website from the get-go helps in achieving high rankings with Google and other search engines: No blog to read or SEO expert fees to pay
• Much easier to use than WordPress and has scope of scalability
• Seotoaster is easy for content writers, and website administrators featuring complete front-end edition

8. e107

e107 is an open source content management system covering every area of content management including admin, file and directory management, multimedia, e-commerce and so on. It is embed with simple, intuitive interface and flexible architecture which allows the CMS to perform well on anything ranging from blogs and personal websites to business sites and intranets.

Advantages of popular e107:

• Loads of plugins available on the CMS
• Easy to install
• Great community support
• Designers are available to create beautiful theme designs
• Highly customizable

Disadvantages:

• Not many plugins are available for bloggers

9. Concrete5

Concrete5 is a free open source CMS gaining popularity among designers for its focus on ease of use. With Concrete5, one can manage a small to medium size website as easy as a WYSIWYG. A great feature of Concrete5 is it keeps revising a page which make it easy to roll back to a previous version of the page.

Advantages include:

• The Concrete5 platform is quite flexible and easy to edit and update
• Best for non-programmers that want a static website
• Creating themes with Concrete5 is very easy
• SEO friendly
• Multilingual support
• One can develop own themes

Disadvantages include:

• It needs solid knowledge of HTML/CSS and an acquaintance with PHP
• Community is not very large
• It needs a blank database, which can be frustrating if on a shared hos

10. Typo3

TYPO3 is an open source enterprise-class content management system. The powerful TYPO3 can handle large and complex websites. It has a broad base of extensions and developers that can add to its functionality. A developer is able to create pages with a variety of content elements such as regular text, forms, multimedia, file links, etc. Advantages include:

• Many extensions
• Powerful scripting allows flexibility without custom PHP plugins
• Unlimited scalability: Typo3 can acquire new functionality and expand or modify existing ones with special modules
• The CMS allows working with draft versions of web site without affecting live site content
• Unlimited Undo/History levels make it possible to roll back your changes to a previous state, regardless of how old that stage is
• Multiple domains/sites on one installation: Single Typo3 installation facilitates working on several web sites with different domains. This is useful when your sites have shared or related content or when these sites belong to one complex project
• Gives the ability to temporarily hide some content without deletin
• Huge international developer community
• Multilingual
• Security: A high level of protection from hacker attacks or hijacking of business-critical company websites is offered

Disadvantages:

• Learning typoscript is time consuming
• The documentation lacks detail and needs more examples
• It’s not suitable for small websites
• Many extensions haven’t been updated in years
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• 18 Open Source Content Management Systems, Part 1