Posts Tagged ‘cms’

Picking a medium in which to publish a new web site can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. The goal of your site should be the indicator for which type of solution you go with. My personal preference, in general, is to use a CMS (content management system) of some sort. The three most popular choices available on the open source market are:

• WordPress
• Joomla
• Drupal

Each one of these has its pluses and minuses, but they all perform the same duty. They enable the individual creating the content to be able to create a quality site with little web experience and without expensive software. This is a real plus since one can create and edit content from anywhere Internet access is available. It is one of the most popular and efficient “Cloud computing” solutions available.

Another benefit is that they all offer the built in feature called RSS (Real Simple Syndication). A RSS feed allows a reader the ability to subscribe to the newest published information on your site and read it without having to go directly to your site.

The last major benefit is cost. These systems are all modular, much like today’s smartphones.  Plug-ins can be installed to add various features without having to pay a programmer to custom develop a solution. A community of developers is always developing new plug-ins for these systems, so it is always worthwhile checking with your web solutions provider if there is a ready-built solution for your need.

The last major advantage of using a CMS is that it is intrinsically search engine friendly. For some reason or another, search engines love these sites. Personally, I have found this by just comparing sites I’ve built through traditional coding and those managed by a CMS (Wordpress and Joomla). The number of hits on the CMS driven sites are much higher than those for the traditional site.

So, if you’re looking to establish a new site or redevelop and existing one, I would highly recommend turning to a CMS such as WordPress or Joomla depending on the needs and size of the site.

Joomla!, the open source CMS (content management system) has made great progress in its development since its early versions which were a cousin of Mambo. The developers of Joomla have been very busy building a new version of the CMS which will greatly improve the operations of the previous versions.

In the current version, 1.5, the menu system was overhauled for easier use. The multiple different menus that delineated certain related tasks were combined into one logical place and the installation of extensions was made easier. For those of us who go under the hood, the coding from version 1.0 to 1.5 also changed.

Now, bigger changes will be coming to version 1.6 which is now in the Alpha stage of development. One of the changes will be in extensions management which will greatly improve how we work and update extensions currently installed in the system. However, two of the greatest changes are to the content structure, the ACL (Access Control List) and the content management structure.

In the previous versions of Joomla!, users could only be designated as to how much they could edit content or change the physical structure of the CMS. Now, with the updated ACL, different users will be able to be given  permissions to edit and publish certain pages, a big development step which other CMS sytems already use.

The second major change is in the structure of organization of content. In previous versions, there were two layers, sections and categories. One would create different sections and within those sections would create various categories, but you could not create anything lower than the first layer of categories. Now, with the proposed new structure, sub-categories will be allowed to greatly break down the content articles.

These advancements from my perspective will open up great possibilities for the system to not only the small business owner, but also larger organizations such as schools which need individualized editing for classwork. There are many other possibilities which will open up with a little bit of creativity.