Michael Reed takes a good look at five heavyweight professional content management systems that are all open source and completely free.
WE COMPARETONSOF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO!
ROUNDUP
ProcessWire 3.0.184 WordPress 5.9.3 Joomla! 4.1.2 Drupal 9.3.9 Ghost 4.43.1
HOW WE TESTED…
We started with an Ubuntu LTS (long term service) release. On to this we installed the typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. We hosted this on a virtual machine so that we could zero everything back to the beginning for each CMS. Otherwise, you can easily get tripped up by penalising the first CMS for a difficult setup process, whereas in fact the subsequent CMSes needed just as much work.
In each case, we used the current stable release of the CMS. Wherever we could, we followed the official instructions rather than trying to figure things out for ourselves, in order to ensure that the instructions made sense.
Obviously, installing the system is only the first stage, and we used each of the systems for a while. We put them through their paces, carrying out the kind of everyday tasks that expect from a CMS, such as creating new posts and trying our best to customise each site.