Master List of Content Management Systems 2012

There are literally thousands of content management systems on the market today, each one slightly different from their competitors. To make sense of it all, Website Magazine editors have assembled another one of our popular maFster lists. Follow the links for more information about each individual platform.

WordPress
The most popular content management system available, WordPress offers a powerful "core software" built by a community of hundreds to integrate thousands of possible plugins and themes to help users create and customize their own unique site capable of doing exactly what their businesses need.

Joomla!
Capable of running websites for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as large enterprise organizations like Barnes & Noble, Pizza Hut and GE, Joomla offers site owners all the tools needed to create "standard" websites, intranets, social networks, shopping carts, directories and more with a host of different extensions to increase and manipulate the site's functionality.

concrete5
This CMS is built for marketers, but strong enough for any website owner. Users are easily able to edit content on their websites directly from the page in different "blocks" containing various content types, such as text, images, image slideshows, comments systems, file lists, maps and then some.

ImpressCMS
A community-created, database-driven, fully modularized system for content management, ImpressCMS allows users to create a wholly customized site based on their individual needs that features multi-byte language support, a theme-based skinnable interface and worldwide support.

Drupal
If it's good enough for the White House website... Open source CMS Drupal offers features for easy site creation and management, such as a framework that can be used with any type of database server, a simple Web interface for content management, a variety of themes for custom site designs and over 14,500 modules to extend a site's functionality.

Etomite
Ideal for CMS users looking to improve their SEO practices, Etomite gives the end user almost complete control over everything about a website, from layout to meta tag generation.

CMS Made Simple
This lightweight (and totally free) system is great for smaller sites and included a robust user interface with a Web-based administration section for theme, template and stylesheet development, add-on modules, content blocks and the ability to manage user groups and permissions.

MODx
The MODx Manager user interface provides an easy-to-use system for even "non-technical" people to make quick changes and create new content for their websites, while being device agnostic, offering options for translating content for different global regions, helping users with SEO with on-page and meta content and just being generally cost effective.

Siteforce
Again, this marketer-focused CMS "built for the cloud" features a simple drag-and-drop studio and lets users add social features and data to Web pages with instant deployment and without burdening IT departments.

FirstSpirit
This new-to-the-U.S. CMS is feature-rich, offering multi-lingual support, historized and easily searched versions of the site and functionality with all output channels, among many other things. The biggest draw of the FirstSpirit CMS by e-Spirit, however, is the incredibly user-friendly interface for the creation, integration and management of a variety of content types.

SilverStripe
With a distinct focus on ease-of-use for site editors, even those with little-to-no Web background, SilverStripe makes it easy to create new pages and drop them where you want on the sitemap, include links, images, Flash animations and video into your content, copy and paste content from Microsoft Word and view drafts of content changes before publishing them, among many other features.

ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine is great for designers because of an open template system that allows any design to be integrated into a website and dynamic Web pages (that can actually be created without any programming knowledge). It also just happens to be a highly scalable solution that highlights the importance of site security and includes a paid support staff as well as a great community of users to answer any questions you may have.

Textpattern
Textpattern was designed to be flexible and extensible and uses a sophisticated engine "that can be infinitely tuned." Users can control all aspects of XHTML and CSS in the Admin interface and integrate hundreds of different plugin options. The CMS uses built-in tags to determine how dynamic content will be retrieved and displayed and features a minimalist and efficient interface for users.

CushyCMS
With no software to install and no programming knowledge required to use, CushyCMS really is "a truly simple CMS." Users can define exactly what aspects of a page can be changed and safely edit standards complient, search engine-friendly content.

Movable Type
This free blog publishing solution gives users the ability to host multiple blogs and standalone content pages and manage files, templates, tags, categories, user roles and trackback links. Site editors utilize static page generation, dynamic page generation or a combination of the two.

Frog CMS
Frog CMS uses PHP directly, which means that site creators/editors don't need to learn or use another scripting language. It features drag-and-drop page ordering, per page layout customization, flexible page content (body, sidebar, extended or summary), simple user and permission management and an unlimited hierarchically structured page navigation menu, among many other features.

Alfresco
This open source CMS "for the social enterprise" offers a low-cost option for larger businesses and agencies looking to rapidly deploy content using pre-built components with lightweight scripting. Alfresco allows users to access and edit content on mobile devices, seamlessly connect to a variety of publishing channels (including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr), collaborate with users through the cloud and lets users integrate with numerous productivity apps like Microsoft Office, GoogleDocs, Apple iWork on the iPad, Adobe Creative Suite and many more.

dotCMS
dotCMS allows users to copy and paste entire websites, include SEO-friendly names for dynamic pages, utilize in-context content authoring, create customized user views, take advantage of a rich widget library and choose between cloud and on-premises deployment, in addition to a number of other features, such as easy tag creation.

Contao
The CMS-Formerly-Known-As-TYPOlight offers users the ability to test drive it online before installing the solution, provides a wide variety of CSS-based themes for website design, comes with a full-text search engine, provides easy live updates, includes a number of built-in modules and, of course, lets users extend a site's functionality through the addtion of various extensions.