A detailed look at the top blogging tools and key considerations for nonprofits.

This article is courtesy of Idealware, which provides candid information to help nonprofits choose effective software. For more articles and reviews, go to www.idealware.org.

While often regarded as a platform for people to share their personal stories, a blog can also be used to tell the story of an organization. Whether showcasing your work, offering behind-the-scenes glimpse into your nonprofit, highlighting the people you serve, or advocating a particular point of view, a blog can be a powerful - and influential - communication and public-relations tool for your organization.

Many companies are interested in the possibilities of content management, to help them build websites which are easy to maintain. But the prohibitive cost of most commercial content management systems (CMSs) can be a put off. Open source CMSs offer a cost effective way to build a "content managed website". In this series of articles, we review some of the better known offerings, and explain how they could be put to use within an organisation.

This is a set of tasks I use to get a feel for the default capabilities of a CMS once I've installed it. I used this set of tasks as a basis for evaluating the features of each CMS in this review. It is by no means a comprehensive test suite, but aims to provide a framework for making quick assessments of CMSs.

Open source content management software sucks. It sucks really badly.

 The only things worse is every commercial CMS I've used. But it really doesn't have to be that way.

For a small business pharmacy shop looking to presenting themselves with a small website I’m aiming at a web CM system that integrates the following:

• Content should be edited via a highly configurable, yet minimal rich text editor so there is no difference to writing text in Word with even less function offered (only predefined CSS-Styles for title, paragraph, etc.). No need of code view.