Drupal is an open source software package that allows users to easily publish, manage and organize content on a website. The concept of built-in functionalities in combination with freely available add-on modules enables Drupal to support a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.

One of Drupal's strengths is the mixing of social software tools (e.g. blogging systems, user-generated-content, interaction) and business driven features such as content management. However while a basic Drupal installation/setup is quite straight forward, easy and quick, it may take many more hours before a system actually offers a functional range similar to TYPO3.

Core updates are sometimes a risk and a little bit tricky because modules are not compatible with one another through all Drupal versions. As a result of this, manual installations of modules are essential and poorly planned updates could tie the web site up.

The roots of Joomla go back to a CMS called "Mambo" which started development in 2000. Five years later, Joomla positions itself as a "rebranding of Mambo" and it is often the system of choice for home users or small business. The software package is not complicated to set up and many aspects such as ease-of-use and extensibility have made Joomla a popular open source web site system. The lack of granular user access control and multi-site capabilities are typical downsides in the current Joomla version.

Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Joomla is free software and the developer community can contribute add-ons to the public.

Released in 2003, the original objective of WordPress was to deliver a simple and easy to use personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog and its roots and development go back to 2001.

In fact, Wordpress is more a Weblog software (also called "blog") than a full-featured content management system. Neverthless the system features templating, themes, integrated link management, a search engine-friendly and clean permalink structure, categories in articles support tagging of posts and articles. Similar to TYPO3, its plugin architecture allows development of add-ons to extend the functionality of the WordPress core system.

Magento is not really a CMS in its own right, it is a fully featured open source eCommerce system that can have content managed pages in the shop. It allows great flexibility over look and feel and the way the shopping process works. It has a full administration interface that allows for easy maintance of all aspects of your online precence. We often configure Magento in parallel with a full CMS system to create the ultimate online presence.