eCommerce continues to steadily evolve as it’s become one of the most reliable, and preferable ways to purchase goods. Its very existence has allowed countless number of businesses reach new heights, and take advantage of endless possibilities. As new standards, ideas, and applications for eCommerce role out, the strength of your online presence must support these new trends.

Having a powerful and dependable Content Management System is becoming less of an option and more of a need. Below we’ve outlined 5 of the best Content Management Systems to fuel your eCommerce. Please note that CMS’s like WordPress and Joomla, although not entirely focused on eCommerce, they offer effective plugins to take care of your basic and intermediate level needs.

Business Catalyst

Business Catalyst allows you to build typical eCommerce web sites that range from small to medium sizes. Once you sign up you’ll get a hosted eCommerce application that provides you with a dedicated content management system (CMS) that has the power to jumpstart blogs, shopping carts, and forums. You’ll also be greeted with easy to understand analytics that let you track web site visits and customer activity. The user interface is simple and concise. Business Catalyst not only helps build your online store, but it manages it as well. BC is a full-featured hosted application that offers great support over the phone, email, or live chat.

Magento

Magento is classified as an open source eCommerce platform that eases the flow between design and online sales. Magento is one of the fastest growing eCommerce solutions in the market, and with their long list of features it’s not hard to see why. Magento likes to out-smart other content management systems for eCommerce by providing excellent options to grow your site. Magento is a very flexible eCommerce platform that lets you Manage multiple websites, integrate Google Website Optimizer and over 50 payment gateways.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is a free, open source eCommerce platform that delivers a wide variety of features such as the full control of your inventory, orders, shipping and tracking, allowing you to manage your business in real-time. This eCommerce platform has a WYSIWYG editing tool for your products and the managing of images. Your online store can be customized at any time, accept PayPal payments, and manage customer based subscriptions. PrestaShop can send payments directly to your bank account, or your PayPal account.

OpenCart

Open cart’s admin area has a well designed user interface that simplifies the process of tweaking your site. When you first begin using this eCommerce platform you’re given a customizable layout that gives your products an adequate amount of “breathing room”. OpenCart lets you take full control of your shipping features and the ability to take coupons. You can use coupon codes for your existing customers as incentives. Open Cart is ideal for small to medium sized businesses that are looking for flexibility and the power of useful tools at their fingertips.

osCSS

osCSS is simply a php eCommerce shopping application that’s built on the oscommerce GPL code. It’s available for a free download and distribution. This version complies with current web standards by using XHTML 1.1 as the mark-up language. You’ll have full take on how to display your products and the way they will be shipped. Although osCSS isn’t the most popular or powerful eCommerce CMS, it sure does get the job done.

Choosing the right content management system can be an overwhelming task for a web designer or developer. There are so many available, all with different features, it can be difficult to decide which is the best solution for a particular web project. For complex websites, a fully featured CMS is probably the best way to go. However, for simple sites, lots of bells and whistles can be overkill and actually be a bit confusing for the person maintaining the website.

In this article, I’ve rounded up 10 simple and light weight cms solutions. All of these systems were built with simplicity and ease-of-use in mind.

Wolf CMS

Wolf CMS simplifies content management by offering an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions, as well as the tools necessary for file management. Wolf CMS is a fork of Frog CMS. Although the two applications still share a family resemblance, Wolf has left Frog’s development path.

Get Simple

GetSimple is an XML based lite Content Management System. To go along with it’s intuitive user interface, it’s loaded with features that every website needs, but with nothing it doesn’t.

Perch

Perch is a really little content management system for when you (or your clients) need to edit content without the hassle of setting up a big CMS.

sNews

sNews is a completely free, standards compliant, PHP and MySQL driven Content Management System. It is extremely lightweight, simple and customizable. This cms consists of only one core engine file, one independent template file and its accompanying CSS stylesheet file, plus an .htaccess file that makes all URLs search engine friendly.

Zimplet CMS

Zimplit is extremely lightweight, simple and customizable. It’s easy to install, and easy to use via a simple web interface. Zimplit consists of only one core engine file.

PageLime

PageLime is a simple CMS for web designers. It acts as a remote Content Management System that allows you to update the content, images, and documents on your web site without any setup. All you have to do is add the ‘cms-editable’ CSS class to any element on your site, and we host the application that edits your site.

Surreal CMS

With Surreal CMS, there’s absolutely nothing to install. Just enter your website’s FTP info and you’re connected! Within minutes, you can enable webpages, add content regions, assign editors, and begin updating your website — and you don’t even need an FTP client to get started.

CMS Made Simple

CMS Made Simple provides a fast and easy way to create a web site and manage its contents. Use it to make a home page for your family — or your multinational corporation!

Simple CMS

A fully branded, easy to use content management system for your clients. All you do is add a little piece of code to your existing site.

CushyCMS

CushyCMS is a Content Management Systems (CMS) that is truly simple. It’s free for unlimited users, unlimited changes, unlimited pages and unlimited sites.

It’s built from the ground up with ease of use in mind – for both content editors and designers. It’s such a simple CMS that it takes less than 3 minutes for a web designer to implement. No PHP or ASP required for this CMS. If you can add CSS classes to HTML tags then you can implement CushyCMS. It’s also a hosted CMS, so no installation or maintenance is needed either.

WordPress was build to be used for blogging only but with the use of many valuable plugins you can extend it to a full content management system. I don’t think so if anything is left out which you can’t find in Plugins, means you can turn your WordPress into whatever you want.

Here i have collected 20 useful WordPress Plug-ins that will add up more functionality to your WordPress site.

1. Relevanssi

The matching engine Relevanssi uses is a fairly simple and in some ways limited, but it is a significant improvement over basic WordPress search and offers the necessary functionality for .

Download

2. Flutter

Flutter is a feature rich WordPress CMS plugin that focuses on easy templating for the developer and simplifies content management for the admin by creating custom write panels that can be fully customized (radio buttons, file uploads, image uploads, checkboxes, etc).

Download

3. WP-CMS Post Control

Post Control from WordPress CMS Modifications builds upon the new controls in WordPress 2.7 to give you complete control over your write options.

Download

4. Custom Admin Branding

he Custom Admin Branding Plugin allows you to brand and customize the WordPress administration area for clients or for personal use. You can display custom images and styles for the login screen, admin header and footer.

Download

5. User Access Manager

With the “User Access Manager”-plugin you can manage the access to your posts, pages and files. You only create a user group, put registered users to this and set up the rights for this group.

Download

6. More Fields

More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write/Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post.

Download

7. WordPress Navigation List

The WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) plugin is a powerful tool designed to provide you with complete control over the creation, styling and contents of your web site’s navigation.

Download

8. WPML Multilingual CMS Plugin

WPML makes multilingual content management easy, just like running a site in one language.

Download

9. MailPress

Allows you to send beautiful and styled html and plain text mails based on dedicated themes and templates.

Download

10. PageMash

Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.

Download

11. Flexi Pages Widget

Flexi Pages Widget is a highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. Can be used as an alternative to the default ‘Pages’ widget.

Download

12. Role Scoper

Role Scoper is a comprehensive access control solution, giving you CMS-like control of reading and editing permissions. Assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories.

Download

13. Yoast Breadcrumbs

Easily add breadcrumbs to your template. If you’re using one of the supported WordPress frameworks, it’s as easy as enabling the plugin and checking the “Try to add automatically box”, if you’re not using one of those, adding it is as simple as adding one line of code to your template!

Download

14. WP eCommerce

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

Download

15. Single Post Templates

The Single Post Template plugin adds the ability for your theme to include “Post Templates” in much the same way you can add “Page Templates”, allowing you to choose (via a simple dropdown) which post template you want to use, on a per-post basis.

Download

16. cForm II

cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!

Download

17. Idealien Category Enhancements

This plugin makes category templates be selectable by drop-down list from the manage > categories screen of the admin console. It makes the selection / use of category and post templates as easy as page templates.

Download

18. WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Download

19. Permalinks Moved Permanently

If you just migrated your WordPress blog from one permalink structure to another, and you don’t want to lose Pagerank or traffic that accesses your blog through the old permalinks, this is for you.

Download

20. Pods CMS

Pods is a CMS framework for WordPress. It allows you to add and display your own content types.

Download

Pods CMS

 Flutter

WP-CMS Post Control

PageMash

 Role Scoper

CForms II

Scissors

TinyMCE Advanced

Side Content 

 Multi-level Navigation

Dashboard Pages

 Custom Admin Branding

Content Management System, or CMS is an application used to manage news easily so that users can publish, edit and delete articles from the back-end admin system. HTML and other scripting language are not necessary to operate a CMS, though having them will add more advantages.

1. WordPress

WordPress is a powerful yet easy to use content management system. Initially it was designed as a blogging platform. However, it slowly become popular and can be customized into a powerful CMS with some tricks and plugins.

2. Drupal

Drupal is a free and open source modular framework and Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP. It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites.

3. Joomla

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

4. Frog CMS

Frog CMS simplifies content management by offering an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions, as well as the tools necessary for file management.

5. SilverStripe

SilverStripe is a PHP CMS built with Sapphire framework, and it uses MVC design pattern. you can view example sites that built with SilverStripe from the official webpage.

6. Mambo

Mambo is a full-featured, award-winning content management system that can be used for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Although some Mambo sites had already migrated to Joomla, but i think i should include Mambo as it is still a great CMS.

7. TYPOlight

TYPOlight is a PHP 5 CMS and it has a lot of features such as live update, cross-browser CSS framework generator(IE7 compatible), templated based front end output, use Ajax and Web 2.0 technologies. You should check out the main page for more info.

8. Concrete5

Concrete5 is an open source content management system with simple administaror interface. You can edit a web page live by using the editing toolbar provided after you log in as administrator.

9. Textpattern

Textpattern is yet another very popular content management system. It requires PHP 4 to run and has a lot of plugins that you can use for various customizations.

10. Symphony

Symphony is a CMS that uses XML/XSLT as its templating language. Symphony lets you customize anything you like, from the website’s URL structure to your publishing environment. For a non programmer, this CMS might be complicated to learn.

11. MODx

MODx is both a PHP application framework and content management system. MODx is the first free PHP CMS to offer an API that fully supports Web 2.0 Ajax technology. It is SEO friendly CMS, and allows you to configure the meta content for each page.

12. Habari Project

Habari is a highly recommended open source blogging platform. It is being written specifically for modern web hosting environment, and uses modern object oriented programming techniques.

13. CMS Made Simple

CMS Made Simple is highly customizable and there are a lot of Modules for you to download. The Documentation is pretty complete and easy to follow.

14. ImpressCMS

ImpressCMS is a community developed Content Management System. It is highly scalable and is extremely useful for managing online communities.

15. Exponent CMS

Exponent uses an intuitive and flexible content editing system that allows website pages to be edited on the page as it is displayed. You can download modules and themes from the official website too!

16. MiaCMS

MiaCMS is a fork of the Mambo CMS. It has a powerful and extensible third party entension system, and also a flexible site theming capabilities. MiaCMS supports OpenID and can consider to be a stable and mature CMS.

17. Jojo CMS

Jojo is a search engine friendly CMS. You will have SEO friendly URL to your article, and Jojo will handle www/non-www domains for you. Beside SEO friendly, Jojo also lets you extend the functionality by adding product databases, blogs, image galleries or whatever takes your fancy.

18. TYPO3

TYPO3 is a free Open Source content management system for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets. It offers full flexibility and extendability while featuring an accomplished set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules.

19. Elxis CMS

Elxis CMS comes with a lot of features such as Search Engine Friendly URL, strong security, adjustable member list and complete user profiles. Its automated tasks, modern design, AJAX technology and multi-lingual interface helps you be more productive.

20. Chyrp

Chyrp is a lightweight blogging platform and it uses Twig as the templating engine. The documentation is quite complete and you can download a lot of useful modules from the main site.