Top Ten Open Source Tools for Building Websites
You can build a website to grow your business using these popular free and open source website building tools.
Nowadays, whether you are an individual entrepreneur or representing a business organisation, a website is a must for personal and professional growth. Organisations are spending lots of money to build attractive websites. In this article, we are going to look at some of the open source website building tools that you can use to build your website on your own, without much knowledge about programming or the Internet.
1. WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular open source free CMS (content management system) frameworks available in the website market. The majority of those who don’t know much coding prefer to create a website using WordPress. There are two variants of WordPress. The first is wordpress. com, where you can host your own website, which will have a domain name wordpress.com at the end – for example, maulikparekh.wordpress.com. By paying an amount, you can change the name to your own domain name, say, maulikparekh.com.
The second variant is wordpress. org, where you can download the WordPress framework and install it on your own host providers. Most host providers, by default, support WordPress so we don’t need to install it. But we need to buy everything, like the domain name and hosting space. Based on their requirements and experiences, people choose different options.
If you are a fresher, then you can start with wordpress.com and later, once you are comfortable, you can migrate to wordpress.org. If you don’t have money constraints, then I will definitely advise you to go with your own hosting website using wordpress. org because you can get more freedom, speed, performance and flexibility, all of which are not optimal in wordpress. com. The WordPress framework is written in PHP.
The official websites for WordPress are https://wordpress.com and https://wordpress.org/.
2. Joomla
Joomla is an open source free CMS platform similar to WordPress, and is the most popular framework after WordPress. Joomla is also built on PHP. Joomla’s installation is not as quick as WordPress, but it’s not tough either. There are lots of menus in Joomla compared to WordPress. Many people think that Joomla is more powerful than WordPress. Overall, anyone can opt for Joomla, since it is a stable and popular framework. In the case of Joomla, too, you can host your website on it by downloading the Joomla framework and creating self-hosted websites.
The official website for Joomla is https://www.joomla.org/.
3. Drupal
Drupal is another open source CMS framework like Joomla and WordPress. Drupal’s installation is also similar to Joomla and WordPress. There is an installation script which will install the framework. It also offers different distributions. Drupal bundles are used to create specific kinds of websites. Drupal is a bit complicated after installation. Beginners find it difficult compared to other popular CMS systems, when it comes to changing components of the websites.
The official website for Drupal is https://www.drupal.org/.
All the above three CMS platforms are very popular and there are many similarities between them.
WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are free and open source PHP based frameworks, licensed under GPL.
All three support MySQL as the primary database.
There are different themes, bundles and modules available to add different features and functionalities. All are community driven projects with very good support.
4. OpenCms
OpenCms is a Java and XML based technology, which is used as a professional content management
system. We can create beautiful websites using OpenCms, which is also open source software.
The official website for OpenCms is http://www.opencms.org/en/.
5. Orchard Project
Orchard Project is a free, open source CMS built on the ASP.Net MVC platform. It is also a community driven project. Some of the features of this CMS are modularity, security, multi-lingual support, and being multi-tenant based; we can also create workflows to trigger specific jobs.
The official website for Orchard Project is http://www.orchardproject. net/.
6. concrete5
concrete5 is a free and open source CMS that is coded in MVC (modelview-controller) software architectural pattern with an object-oriented language. It is secure, flexible, SEO friendly and mobile ready. It also has a marketplace. It has a medium-sized community base and support.
The official website for concrete5 is https://www.concrete5.org/.
7. SilverStripe
SilverStripe is a free and open source CMS framework for creating websites. It’s a PHP based framework, which also provides a WYSIWYG website builder. It is not as popular as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.
The official website for it is https://www.silverstripe.org/.
8. MODX
MODX is also a free and open source PHP based framework for publishing content on content on the World Wide Web and intranets.
The official website is https://modx.com/.
9. django CMS
As the name suggests, django CMS is based on Django as well as Python.
It is one of the most popular Python based CMS frameworks, so people who are familiar with Python can try it out. There are many websites built using this CMS.
The official website for it is https://www.django-cms.org/en/.
10. Liferay
Liferay is a free and open source enterprise software product that is mainly used for corporate intranets and extranets. It has inbuilt CMS support and is written in Java. It has an open source and enterprise version. Liferay Portal CE is the open source version of Liferay’s enterprise Web platform.
The official website for it is https://www.liferay.com/.