• Joomla:
• Overview
• Installing Joomla
• User Accounts
• Link Management
• Assigning Privileges
• Submitting news
• Media Manager
• Adding New Category
• Admin Messages
• News Feeds
• Syndicate News Feeds
• Update Contact Page
• Page Impressions
• Customizing Templates
• More Joomla Notes
• WordPress
• WordPress tutorials
• Drupal
• Installing Drupal
• New Admin
• Drupal Notes
• TextPattern
• TextPattern Notes
• SubDreamer
• About SubDreamer CMS
• General Info
• Open Source Templates
• Upgrading CMS

Content Management System -- overview

In these lessons we will go over the administration and use of some content management systems. But first...

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

It is a piece of software that is installed and configured on the backend server of your webhost. It is designed to make a website be very easy to edit existing content as well as update with new content. That is because the content are not coded in static HTML. The content are stored on the database of the webserver and is dynamically served upon the browser's request. The software that performs this serving and rendering of the page is the CMS and is sometimes coded in PHP. The database where this content is pulled is sometimes the MySQL database.

The system makes it very easy to organize content. The site can have sections. Sections can have categories. And categories can have items (or stories).

Sections, categories, and items can be re-arranged and moved through a web user interface known as the Admin Panel (which has a password login of course).

An "author" can add new content without touching or knowing anything about HTML. The author simply logs in, clicks on an menu to add new item, and starts typing into an textbox.

When done, the author (depending on the privileges granted by the administrator) can either save the stories for review by a "publisher" or "publish" the stories immediately.

The story that is typed can be formated with an WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that enables styling such as bolding, linking, coloring, etc. Or if the author is knowledgeable in HTML, he/she can switch to HTML view and code in that.

[Picture shown with JCE installed.]

With the JCE installed, photos and images can be easily uploaded from the author's desktop. Styling, rollover images, and linkable images are all possible.

RSS feeds can be enabled so that whenever a story is published, those users with RSS readers will immediately see the updated content.

A setting can be enabled to make the entire site SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly so that search engines can index each individual page. If you have an existing site with existing pages, an automatic redirection can be put in place to redirect any user from the old page to the new page.

What CMS Run On

The specifics will depend, but open-source CMS such as Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, Wordpress, and TextPattern will run on most Linux host that have PHP and MySQL. Commercial CMS like Subdreamer is also PHP and MySQL based.

If you need to run on Windows hosting, you might look into open-source systems such as DotNetNuke, and RainbowPortal. Or a commercial system like ixportal.

Next Lesson

Go to first lesson now to install Joomla.