- Choosing an Open Source CMS: Beginner's Guide
- Nirav Mehta
- 460字
- 2025-02-23 09:38:20
Time for action-understanding technical requirements
- Go to www.cmsmatrix.org.
- From the list in the left column, select DotNetNuke, Joomla!, Movable Type, and WordPress. WordPress is our preferred CMS for now, but we are also interested in others.
- Click on Compare.
- This gives you an extensive feature comparison. For now, we are interested in the System Requirements section at the top. It will look like the following image.
- The most important aspects are the Application Server, Database, Programming Language, and Operating System. Notice that WordPress and Joomla! use PHP, DotNetNuke is on ASP.NET, while Movable Type uses Perl.
- For detailed technical requirements, you may want to visit the CMS's web site. For example, WordPress's minimum requirements can be found at http://wordpress.org/about/requirements/.
- If you already have a web hosting account, go to your host's site and check out the plan details. See the technical features and find out if your host supports the technical requirements of your preferred CMSs. Our host shows features like this:
- At this time, you may also want to review any other technical requirements your site has. For example, if you are hosting videos, you may need a large disk space and bandwidth. You may also need SSL support to improve security of the site.
- At this stage, we know that our web host can support WordPress easily. But will also support Joomla!, Movable Type, and a whole lot of other CMSs.
What just happened
We confirmed that our web host can support our preferred CMS. We first went to CMS Matrix to find out the system requirements of a few CMSs. The best part of CMS Matrix is that it shows a side-by-side feature comparison of your shortlisted CMSs. This makes it very easy for us to determine which CMS will fit our needs.
We then looked at the specific requirements of WordPress. Checking out detailed technical requirements helps us understand them better and confirm them with our host.
Equipped with this information, we went to our host's site to check if our host supports those requirements. Thankfully, it does support PHP and MySQL. As a matter of fact, it has WordPress among its included plug-ins. This means, it should be really easy to set up WordPress on this host. We also saw that the host can support any PHP/MySQL or Perl-based system.
If you can't understand whether your host supports your preferred CMS or not, you should contact them and find out. If they have specific restrictions on what features are available, you should find a CMS that can work with that restriction. If that fails, change your host!
We have now confirmed that our host supports WordPress, so let's go ahead and install WordPress! Let's see if it's really as easy as it claims to be.