Nowadays, open source softwares are largely used to design, develop and maintain websites. Among the various types of open source softwares, the content management systems(CMS) are the most widely used ones, especially those written in PHP. These open source, PHP written CMS platforms have become extremely popular as they serve users with several benefits. They enable users to modify, publish and edit the content of the website. Owing to the popularity of these systems, many companies now provide open source customization services in which they provide open source web design.

Usage of CMS depends upon the features that it provides. However, the core features of these platforms vary from system to system. While in a simpler system, only a handful of features are showcased, other systems like enterprise systems have more powerful and complex features. Through these systems, a large number of people can share and contribute to the stored data. A person can give controlled access be defining users or user groups who can make changes to the data. Significant changes in the websites could be made easily.

Currently, there are plenty of CMS platforms in PHP that are used for open source design but, few of them have become prominent names in the web design and development industry. An acquaitance with these names would help you to know which system best suits your requirement so that you could choose accordingly.

WordPress
Emerging as a class blogging tool, this award winning, dynamic CMS has been extensively used to develop dynamic websites. It has been written in PHP and has been stuffed with features like themes, plugins, widgets and multi-user and multi-blogging, WordPress has become a preferable choice for open source CMS customization. It even consists of a web template system that uses a template processor. One of the most beneficial aspects of WordPress is that it provides search engine friendly structure to your website. It also supports tagging and provide standardized formatting and styling of texts in articles.

Drupal
This CMS, also used as content management framework(CMF) serves as the back-end system for at lease 1.5 % of websites worldwide that include political and government sites. The popularity of this platform can be figured out by the fact that it is used for government sites like whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. Although, Drupal has the basic features that are common to all other CMS, it has got excellent plug-in extensibility and modular design that has also established it as a CMF. One of the best things about Drupal is that the basic website installation and administration of this CMS does not require any programming skills.

Joomla
This system is chiefly used as a CMS and is used to publish content on world wide web and intranet. It can also be used to publish content on an MVC application framework independently. Written in PHP, this system uses object-oriented programming techniques. Its main features include RSS feeds, page caching, printable versions of blogs, polls, news, pages and a support for language internationalization. After WordPress, Joomla is the second most used CMS on the world wide web.

All the above three CMS serve as excellent platforms of web design and development. Web development in these platforms may require programming skills but, after development, the users can manage their websites easily by using these systems.

Author's Bio: 

Stela Robinson is a professional PHP developer and works in a reputed web design and development firm. she is well-versed with open source web design and open source customization and has written several articles on these topics.