Content Management System Options

For Units of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts:

If you are working with the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and looking to build or rebuild a unit’s website, you should strongly consider WordPress for your content management system (CMS), as it will let you stay aligned with Georgia Tech and Ivan Allen College standards without having to reinvent the wheel – just use the official Georgia Tech Theme and all you have to do is fill in the blanks and create your content pages.  Please contact the college web developer if you are looking to start a new WordPress site, as he can make sure you get the right configuration of WordPress to best suit your needs. Do not start a new stand-alone WordPress site without first getting the approval of the web development and IT support units of the college!

That said, for larger units, including our schools and larger project centers, Drupal is still a supported option.  For more information on Drupal development, there is an active local development community which maintains a Drupal resource website. All new Drupal site requests must first get web developer and IT support unit approval, and must be set up by the web developer's office using the college's prepackaged implementation of Drupal.

For All Other Website Needs:

For websites not directly associated with a unit of the College of Liberal Arts (e.g. faculty and graduate student personal sites, research project sites, etc.), we support and strongly recommend the use of the WordPress-based system known as Sites @ Georgia Tech . 

We do not support Drupal for these needs, as Drupal now requires a strong amount of technical support and maintenance, and the college cannot provide that kind of support for non-unit websites.  If you are thinking about Drupal, be prepared to do this technical support yourself or to hire someone (on an ongoing basis) with strong web development and web application support skills to do this regular Drupal maintenance.  (This maintenance includes, but is not limited to regularly applying software patches to your Drupal based website.)

List of Known Content Management Systems

While we strongly recommend WordPress and particularly the Sites @ Georgia Tech service, there are many other content management systems available today, ranging from free open source options to pricey commercial options.  Free options can give you more flexibility for less up-front cost, but commercial options often come with a support center that you can call / email / chat with when you run into problems.  Keep in mind that commercial options do have a monetary cost, and usually that is a yearly fee and not just a one-time purchase.

The content management system list below is provided for general reference only.  These systems are in no way endorsed by Georgia Tech or the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.  Further, the college cannot provide any support for any unapproved content management systems.  If you choose an unsupported system and run into problems that you cannot fix yourself, you may end up having to rebuild your whole site in one of the approved systems.

Open Source Options:

Commercial Options: