Selecting a Content Management System is easy - if you know what matters to you.  There are dozens, if not hundreds of criteria to consider - but probably only a few are critical to you.

Let’s take a simple example.  How do you lean about a new topic?  Consider these criteria around support:

Support

1. Vendor Support - Are the tutorials, videos, downloadable guides?
2. Consultant Support:  What is the availability of support from commercial consulting organizations?
3. Community Support: Are there are a number of different helpful forums and discussion lists where anyone can ask questions about the system and receive answers?
4. Books:  Are there books on the system are available?

Only you know which of those criteria are important.  When you look at a list like the one being presented in this post you need to pick out the important criteria.  If you have never read a computer manual or book in your life than the criteria “Books:  Are there books on the system are available” really does not matter to you.  If you have limited budget than the availability and strength of community support will matter to you.

So as you look at this list realize that your selection process needs to include:

1. Create a list of criteria that matter to YOU and YOUR business
2. Rank/evaluate the products against those criteria
3. Decision Time!

Product/Organization Strength

1. History:  How long has the application been around?  Is this a new product or one with an established user base?
2. System Governance: Is this a commercial product with an owner or an open source project loosely lead by teams or an open source project with clear leadership and guidance?
3. Upgrade Frequency:  Are there regular updates or is this an expiring or sputtering product?

Ease of Hosting and Installation

1. Time to Install: How long will it take a user with experience installing systems (but not this one) to install this application?
2. Hosting Environment: Can the CMS can be hosted on a standard (and inexpensive) shared Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP environment available from hosting services like BlueHost, HostMonster and many others?  While many hosting companies offer out of the box support for Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, a solution like Plone is far more limiting.

CMS Content Administration

1. How easy or hard is it to find a section when you need to edit it?
2. Ease of Text Editing: You will probably spend a lot of time in the editor - is it easy for you to use?
3. Pasting from Word: Is there a function that allows you to cleanly paste in text from Word - this causes issues in many editors.
4. How easy or hard to add an attachment? - Graphic, Document, Video etc.
5. YouTube Videos: Bedsides attaching a video, linking to it, can videos be embedded in a page by for immediate display?
6. How easy or hard is it to add an option to the Navigation Bar?
7. Accessibility of Admin Interface: Depends if this is a small or large business and where you are located - there might be compliance standards, like the US 508 accessibility standards, that could impact your decision.
8. Admin Languages: Do you care if the administrative interface is available in multiple languages?

Initial Installation

1. Default Setup: After you install - what have you got?  For example, upon installation, does the application include things like a blog post, a page, a comment and some default blog-like widgets and themes?  While none of the applications have all this, WordPress has more out of the box than Drupal.
2. Availability of themes or templates: What is the availability of pre-packaged graphical themes appropriate for your types of business?
3. Ease of Theme Installation: Look and feel is very understandable to most people and its fun to play with compared to configuring options to optimize performance.  So, how hard it is to download and preview a new theme or template?

Administration and Maintenance

1. Setting Up Users - How easy is this to learn?
2. Site Backup: Automatic or Manual?  How easy to setup?
3. Upgrades - Do upgrades respect or break existing themes/templates and add-on components?
4. Notification of Out-of-Date Version:  Are you alerted when using an out-of-date version of the system?
5. Options to Not Upgrade: Do you have to be on the bleeding edge, or can you remain comfortable on the leading edge, a version behind?
6. Ease of Installing an Upgrade: Similar to the initial install - how easy of hard is this?

We focused a bit more on the administration and maintenance side of a CMS to get you started.  Again - you consider the sections that matter to you and add criteria that apply to your business - Search Optimization, Community Features, Workflow options.  Get started with lists like this and build the CMS selection that matters to your business needs.

Related posts:

1. One-Click Installation of WordPress with Blue Host
2. Deciding on Drupal versus WordPress
3. Wordpress Installation Guide
4. Understanding CMS Jargon
5. Is it safe to use WordPress Plugins?