Finding & Using
Content
Management Software (CMS)
SolveYourProblem.com Article Series: Web Site Design
If all this talk of coding and designing scares
you off, you might want to know that there is an alternative
to all this. You can install a kind of software called a Content
Management System (CMS) that allows you to put content up on
the web without ever knowing a thing about HTML.
Fantastico
Depending on your host, you might find that you already have
a selection of content management software titles available
and ready to install from your cPanel. Log in, and take a look
for the Fantastico script installer. If you have it, then you'll
be able to read a description of each piece of software you
have available to you – try out a few of the CMSes to see which
ones you like.
Finding Content Management Software (CMS)
If you don't have Fantastico on your host, or you don't like
what it offers you, don't worry: there's plenty of choices
out there on the web when it comes to CMS software.
For finding free CMS software, a truly excellent resource
is www.opensourcecms.com. At that site, you can use the menu
at the side of the page to see lots of open source CMSes running
before you commit to downloading them and installing them yourself.
Textpattern, Drupal and Plone are very popular right now, so
they're a good place to start.
If you're considering commercial CMSes as well, then you should
take a look at www.cmsmatrix.org, which provides an up-to-date
comparison of almost every CMS out there. Be prepared, though,
that commercial CMSes can be ridiculously expensive or unnecessarily
expensive.
Getting a Custom CMS Built
If nothing out there seems to meet your needs, you might consider
having a web designer build you a custom CMS in a scripting
language like Perl or PHP. Any web designer worth their salt
should have something basic already that they can build whatever
features you want onto. This can be really good when it comes
to making your website work the way you want, since the CMS
will be built around your website to make it as easy as possible
for you to modify.
Using a CMS
The whole point of content management software is to make
it much easier to add content to your website and to edit the
content that's already there. Once you've installed your CMS,
you will generally be able to log into its user system using
a special admin password. This will add 'edit' options to the
existing pages of the site, as well as giving you a 'new page'
link somewhere to allow you to create a new page.
When it comes to actually writing the content of the pages,
most CMSes will make it easy for you to copy and
paste from programs like Word: they shouldn't require any special HTML
formatting. Some will require you to mark words with special
symbols if you want them to be bold or italic, but it shouldn't
be too troublesome.
Changing the design with a CMS usually involves installing
a template into a template folder and then selecting it in
the options. Creating your own templates can be complicated,
depending on what software you're using, but it shouldn't be
any trouble for a web designer, and most template sites will
provide designs in a format suitable for this kind of use
Finding a Hosted CMS
Once you know which CMS you want, an alternative to installing
it on a web host that doesn't necessarily support it is to
do a search and find a host that specifically supports your
CMS. You shouldn't have too much trouble finding a host somewhere
that will support you – if nothing else, you might try opensourcehost.com,
which supports almost every open source CMS out there.
Using a host solution might be a little more expensive, but
it will save you a lot of time in configuration and a lot of
problems if anything goes wrong. Using a hosted CMS is one
of the quickest ways to set up a website: you simply pay the
host, log in, add your content and you're away.
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SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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