Content Management Systems PDF Print E-mail

A content management system is software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site, much like your local public library keeps track of books and stores them. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. Since the CMS manages all your content, you don't have to.

For a long time CMS's were the holy grail of web design. Large companies paid an absolute fortune to highly skilled developers to produce systems which would manage their websites and intranets. Luckily for us, whilst this work still goes on, for the bulk of SME businesses, there are plenty of open source (free) content management systems available which enable anyone even vaguely familiar with word processing to manage their own website.

Content Management Systems offer you:

  • Ability to update the content (images, text, media, files, etc) of your own website without having to have knowledge of website code such as HTML or CSS.
  • Point and click usability to achieve this
  • Dynamic content which updates automatically depending on time/date or external websites
  • Theming systems which enable you to completely change the design, colour scheme and look of your website with some simple edits.

 

I recommend the following Open Source CMS's

Joomla!
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone. Tell me more...

Wordpress
WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. This Open Source project is completely free and has hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.)

There are obviously many, many more CMS's out there, but in terms of open source CMS's, these are the largest, the best supported and the most widely used. This means that updates are regular, security holes are patched quickly and support with problems is fast and efficient. They have their limitations, and if your website needs some serious power behind it then there are also various commercial options.