Content Management Systems (CMS)

There's changes afoot in the way web designers make sites for their clients, and it's apparent in the fact that I've had several people ask me in the last week what a CMS is.

CMS stands for Content Management System, which in its simplest form is a website which the user can update without needing a web designer or any technical knowledge.

It works like this: a web person sets up your company's CMS with corporate branding, logos, colours schemes - all the things that a website needs to be a fully customised part of your marketing plan. Then the web person gives you a username and password to administer the site.

You get to log in online, either through your web browser or another piece of software supplied to you, and add pages of content to the site.

You might add contact details, product pages, profiles of your staff, a gift shop, a photo gallery of last year's Christmas party - anything you like, a good CMS will let you add.

Plus, the dynamic nature of a CMS means that the way these pages display on your site can be measured and changed. A list of "recent updates" or "top ten" can be automatically generated, based on database searches the CMS performs in the background. Customers can be tracked so that products they are interested in are shown to them. A community can be developed by letting users log in and create their own blogs or participate in forum discussions.

Another side to CMS allows collaborative creation of documents and other content. You can start writing a report, add it to your CMS, and permit other users to add to or edit it. In this way it can be an incredibly powerful business or documentation tool.

A handful of years ago this sort of functionality was the stuff of dreams, and even now it's a relatively new and under-utilised technology. Many commercial and open-source CMS systems are available but this fragmented market means many users become confused. However, word is getting out there, and people are asking how they can take advantage of CMS for their own site.

What's the right CMS for me?

Personally, I've used a couple of open-source solutions and one commercial solution, all of which have worked well for the specific situations at hand.

Drupal

Drupal is a full-blown open-source CMS which can handle multiple users uploading and creating pages, stories, images, thumbnail galleries, podcasts etc. It has a long list of powerful features and plugins that mean it can support all sorts of websites, from a personal blog to a complex community portal. While it is very powerful we have found drupal can be difficult to set up, with some plugins "breaking" others.

 

Mambo

Another powerful open-source CMS, Mambo is definitely prettier than the others we've seen once it's installed. Plugin support and customisation is a little trickier than drupal, and the highly-graphical nature of the interface means it is frustratingly slow on occasion.

 

Macromedia Contribute

Macromedia's Contribute and Dreamweaver software packages partner together to make a very stable and user-friendly CMS. The website administrator has control over the site using Dreamweaver and users each get a copy of Contribute through which they can edit and add to the site, based on the permissions set for them.
This system works very well as the administrator (or web designer) has far more control over user access to certain pages and areas within the site.

 

WordPress

As you'll know if you've looked around this site, we are big fans of WordPress, a blogging web application that is very easy to use and can be effectively used as a mini-CMS.

Other links

CMS Matrix

Contains a comprehensive list of available CMS solutions and has the ability to compare between them. As I said above, there's a huge number of solutions available and I've only used a handful of them. If you want to learn more about the others, visit this site.

 

Open Source CMS Scripts

A list of open source CMS scripts from many languages. Provides a description of each and links to download.