Content Management Systems (also known as CMS) enables the owner of the website to add and edit the sites' content without writing or altering code. This is done via an administrative control panel where the owner logins and write content. We feel that any significantly large site should use a content management system.
The three open-source content management system that we will talk about here is Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal. They are all using PHP for the server-side language and MySQL database. Now you see why knowing a little bit about PHP and MySQL in the earlier section is important.
Wordpress is very popular for use in creating blogs and there are many templates out there for Wordpress. Of the three, I think Wordpress is the easiest to learn, which is one of the reasons for its popularity. Hence it is great place to start for beginers.
WordPress is primarily designed as a blogging tool to create a blog-style site. By blog-style site, I am refering to sites where you post an entry on regular basis and the site organizes those entries by "post date" or by
"tags", which are keywords of the subject matter of your post that you associate for each entry.
However, with effort Wordpress can be turned into a content management system where it looks like a website instead of a blog. This may involve altering PHP template file code though.
If you want to build a website-style site instead of a blog-style site, then Joomla! is a good choice. For some reason the name "Joomla!" is often spelled with the exclamation mark at the end of it. So I didn't put it there myself to make it stand out. However, often I will leave off the exclamation mark for convenience.
Joomla content management system that is designed to build website looking sites where you have a top menu and a side menu. Your content is organized into sections, categories, and articles. Sections contain categories. And categories contain articles.
One nice feature of Joomla is that it has collapsing and expanding menus build in. You can click on a section menu item and it expands to show its categories menu items for example.
Joomla also has SEF url and file caching features built-in. But you have to turn them on.
Drupal has the power and flexibility to build blog-style and website-styles site. Because of its power and flexibility, it also is a bit more complicated to learn. Of the three, it has the steepest learning curve.
In fact, this site LearnWebDesignOnline.com is powered by the Drupal content management system.
