I’d like to first start off by saying that I’m not a Microsoft basher. They have many great products and some outstanding developers within their company. I have however transitioned to the Open Source world for a few very specific reasons.

1. The most popular CMSs are based on PHP and mySQL. I see CMS as the web development way of the future. Sure, they’re great for creating blogs, but a little tricky when creating Enterprise level sites. This seems to be changing with subsequent releases, especially with the latest releases of Joomla, Drupal, and now Expression Engine built on the Code Ignitor framework making it extremely scalable.


2. Rapid deployment of new sites.


3. It’s free. Some of the better applications have paid upgraded versions if you need support. If you have a talented development team, those shouldn’t be necessary.


4. One of the strongest advantages is its cross compatibility. Most of the different applications work well with each other.


5. There are thousands of high quality free plug-ins and extensions. Joomla and WordPress are both great examples. If you’re not familiar with all of the plug-ins available with these frameworks, visit wordpress.org/extend/plugins and extensions.joomla.org. It’s quite impressive. Some of the extensions do come with a cost, but they’re usually quite affordable.


6. With Content Management Systems, Cross Browser Compatibility is also an area that has been given much attention in the templating community. The best template generating software creates additional external style sheets for the more common browser types.


7. Since CMSs are based on templates, the look of a site is consistent throughout all of the pages. I’m sure you’ve seen those sites where some of the pages seem somewhat consistent, then you hit a page where it hardly looks like it’s the same site. This is commonly the case when a site doesn’t reside within a CMS and the Application Developer is also in charge of the Front End Development. They’re greatest concern is to make the applications on the page function corretly. As long as they do, an Application Developer is rarely concerend with ascthetics.

There are other reasons, and many forums that deal with this issue more in-depth. I just wanted to share some of the most popular reasons for switching to Open Source. Count the cost before making any radical changes to your IT and IS teams. Be sure to think through all consequences carefully. There are trade-offs with both types.