Which CMS System Is Right for You? Take a Test Drive

In recent years, content management systems (CMS) have become very powerful tools for building, deploying and managing web sites, blogs and more. And, along with that trend, open course CMS platforms have absolutely flourished. You're probably familiar with some of the big names in this arena, including Drupal (which Ostatic is based on) and Joomla. As we noted in this post, selecting a CMS to build around can be a complicated process, since the publishing tools provided are hardly the only issue. What many people don't realize, though, is that you can try out the major CMS platforms at OpenSource CMS, a great site for gaining experience for free.

"OpenSourceCMS.com is a central resource for all things Open Source CMS and gives you the opportunity to 'try out' most of the best Open Source CMS tools in the world without marketing fluff and sales people," notes the site. You can find a huge array of open source CMS demos and portals to sample here. 

There are many other demos, news feeds, and discussion forums related to free, open-source CMS platforms at OpenSourceCMS. Especially if you’re paying or considering paying for a proprietary solution, take some of the demos for a spin.

Over time, OpenSource CMS has branched out from simply offering demos of the well-known content management systems to offering demos of ecommerce-focused platforms. For example, you can demo Magento, one of the most popular open source ecommerce environments. You can also discuss these ecommerce platforms with people who have already built online stores around them.

Needles to say, there are also many proprietary CMS platforms, and some CMS platforms come in open source and paid versions. It may be worth evaluating the proprietary platforms, but lots of users want the customization flexibility that the open source CMS platforms provide. For example, here at OStatic, we like the modular aspects of Drupal, and have had success incorporating things like outside search features into our Drupal-based deployment.

In any case, OpenSource CMS lets you put on your site administrator gloves before you've committed to a full deployment around any given platform. Take it for a spin.