When thinking about starting a new online project or just looking to re do an existing one, a question that we get asked a lot is “what platform should I use?”

With that in mind we will be reviewing some of the best content management systems (CMS)  to work with that are available out there and the best thing about every one of them.

Let’s start with WordPress (WP), as an open source software, that means that is a very flexible platform with not a lot of restrictions in terms of what you can do with it, and the way is developed allows a whole community to work on fixes and new features.

Now, there is one misconception about WP and that is that is just a blogging platform. Yes it is true that most of their success is due to blogs, but the more it is developed (currently running on version 3), the more uses you can get out of it, after all, WP does have over 120.000.000 downloads.

Part of that usability comes from the array of plug-ins, the number is over 11,500 and rising, which allows you to extend what you can do with the software and it adds extra features to cover some of the needs you might have and that the software may not necessarily cover.

Something similar can be said about its themes, WP has over 1200 themes to be downloaded from their site but developers are creating new ones all the time so, whether it is directly from the WP platform or getting a custom theme made, you will probably find the look and functionality you want for your site, in fact, there are companies that specialize on creating custom themes as a service they provide.

But remember that we are talking about an open source platform so if you get a theme, it is very likely that you can do some tweaking so it would have everything you want. In fact, if you know your way around it, you can even have different functionalities from one theme integrated with another you are using by playing around with the CSS.

This is not to say that WordPress is the best thing, there are other platforms, and some might even argue that there are some that have been around for longer, like Joomla, but if you want an indicator about how stable this “new” CMS has become, know that Microsoft recently decided to move their whole blogging and content platform called Windows Live Spaces to WordPress instead of developing one on their own, so they are probably on to something exciting.