An Introduction To Content Management Systems

When you get an idea for something new to add to your website, you need to decide which type of application you can use in order to make your site look appealing to others and easy to navigate. This is where a content management system (CMS for short) will come in very useful.

A CMS, which is a complex item of software stores and organizes all of the content you have gathered together to put on your website.

Content Management System

Adding, deleting and editing the content are quite simple tasks once you familiarize yourself with your chosen system. You can customize the design; adapt the whole appearance and feel of the content, use articles, documents, affiliate programs, video and audio files, Google Adsense or any other kind of information that springs to mind. The sky is really the limit with this software and CMS is a clever way to move forward from your everyday basic website to include forums, web logs, new portals and many more options. Another great benefit of CMS is that they are open source (free), so whether you are a novice or a professional they are a great tool for you to use.

Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Xoops, Typo3, Geeklog, PHP-Nuke, and Siteframe are just some of the many good examples of free content management systems and new versions are being introduced to the market every year.

So, how do you decide which is the best one for you and your website?

Of course, the answer to this one depends on exactly what you are aiming to achieve from the particular website you are constructing. What plan do you have? Are you looking to put together a community or a newsy type website? Drupal could be just what you are looking for if that is the case, or if you are about to create a portal site, Joomla is a popular option.

Once you have made the decision about what you intend to accomplish with your website business, then simply carry out some research using your favored search engine to become aware of how the various web content management systems may be of assistance to you. Take a good look at the add-on scripts (extensions) and the graphic designs and styles (templates). Do they do it for you and will they help you to reach your goal? When you have answered the necessary questions, using an overall comparison you will be able to choose the one which is perfect for your needs.

Great advantages of working your way through this process are the additional ideas you may pick up to use on your website. This may well result in a marked improvement on the game plan you started out with originally. Take a little time to find out about content management systems today and this will be invaluable to you in the future when putting together your new content for your website.

An Introduction To Content Management Systems

Introduction to Drupal

Drupal is an open source CMS (Content Management System) platform that empowers individuals, teams and communities to easily and quickly build, deploy and manage websites. The websites usually contain content that can be any combination of text, graphics, audio and video etc. A CMS provides a number of features that simplifies the process of developing and managing websites, including the following:

It provides a tool set for authoring, publishing and managing the contents of the websites.

Content Management System

It provides an administrative interface.

It provides a database repository for the content and a mechanism for associated information

It provides a component for creating and managing the menus and navigational elements.

It provides a component for user management.

It provides a security framework.

Drupal was written by a student of Dutch university, Dries Buytaert. The word Drupal was derived from the Dutch word "druppel" which means "drop" (druppel: "a drop in a water droplet"). The project was initially written by Dries for sharing messages and events with his friends but soon it turned into an open source project in 2001 which expanded the features of CMS on web. The project worked widely, ranging from personal blogs to the large/complex corporate and government sites. The source code of Drupal is written in PHP and distributed under GNU General Public License. The most interesting part is that, Drupal is compatible with all the operating systems and, free to download and use. Drupal can run on any platform that supports both, a web server capable of running PHP 5.2 or higher (the web server could be Apache, Microsoft IIS, Lighttpd, nginx) and a database such as MySQL, Postgre SQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite, MariaDB, MongoDB etc. (For Drupal-7 the database must be MYSQL 5.0 or higher, PostgreSQL 8.3 or higher etc.) There are many versions like Drupal-5, Drupal-6, Drupal-7 etc but the version Dupal-6 and Drupal-7 are only active and are maintained now a days, the version 5 is not used any more. The version 7 was released on 5 Jan 2011 and the versions 6.22 and 7.2 were released on 25 May 2011. The next version 8 is under development and will be released soon.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains the basic features that can be used for creating blogs, forums, polls and websites with the contents generated by the user. Drupal was designed in such a way that the functionality of the core modules can be enhanced by the administrator by enabling the add on modules. The administrator can also extend or override the default behavior of the modules without effecting the core code via the system of hooks and callbacks, which are accessed via API (Application Program Interface).The primary components of Drupal core includes the capability to create and manage the content, menus, user accounts, taxonomy, blogs, forums, online polls, roles, permissions, file uploads/downloads, logging and error reporting.

Introduction to Drupal