The Idea of a CMS to create website

Since you are reading this post, most likely you have already decided to build or use a CMS. But before we go into any detail, it is worth spending some time presenting a clear picture of where we are and how we got here. To be more precise, I will describe how I got here, in the hope and expectation that at least some aspects of my experiences are quite typical.

The World Wide Web (www) was created by Tim Berners-Lee as a simple markup language that exploited the internet to achieve the sharing of academic papers. It performed this useful function for some years while the internet remained relatively closed, with access limited primarily to academics. As the internet opened up during the nineties, early efforts at web pages were very simple. I started up a monthly magazine that reflected my involvement at the time with OS/2 and wrote the pages using a text editor. While writing a page, a tag was needed occasionally, but the work was simple, since for the most part the only tags used were headings and paragraphs, with the occasional bold or italic. With the addition of the odd graphic, perhaps including a repeating background, the result was perfectly presentable by the standards of the time.

But that was followed by a period in which competition between browsers was accompanied by radical development of complex XHTML to create far higher standards of presentation. It became much harder for amateurs to create presentable websites, and people started to look for tools. One early success was the development of Lotus Notes as a CMS, by grafting XHTML capability onto the existing document handling features. While this was not a final solution, it certainly demonstrated some key feature of CMS. One was the attempt to separate the skills of the web designer from the knowledge of the people who understood the content. Another was to take account of the fact that websites increasingly needed a way to organize large volumes of regularly changing material.

As XHTML evolved, so did the servers and programs that delivered it. A significant evolutionary step was the introduction of server side scripting languages, the most notable being PHP. They built on traditional "third generation" programming language concepts, but allied to special features designed for the creation of XHTML for the Web. As they evolved, scripting languages acquired numerous features that are geared specifically to the Web environment.

The next turning point was the appearance of complete systems designed specifically to organize material, and present it in a slick way. In particular, open source systems opened website building to people with little or no budget. That was exactly my situation a few years ago, as a consultant wanting a respectable website, easily maintained, but costing little or nothing to buy and run. A number of systems could lay claim to being ground breakers in this area, and I tried a few that seemed to me to not quite achieve a solution.

For me, the breakthrough came with Mambo 4.5. It installed in a few minutes, and already there was the framework of a complete website, with navigation and a few other useful capabilities. The vital feature was that it came with templates that made my plain text look good. By spending a small amount of money, it was possible to have a personalized template that looked professional, with no special skills needed to insert articles of one kind or another. Mambo also included some simple publishing to support the creation and publication of articles. Mambo and its grown up offspring Joomla! have now become well known features in the CMS world.

My own site relied on Mambo for a number of years, and I gradually became more and more involved with the software, eventually becoming leader of the Mambo development team for a critical period in its development. For various reasons, though, I finally departed from the Mambo organization and wrote my own CMS framework, called Aliro. Extensions that I develop are usually capable of running on any of Mambo, Joomla! or Aliro. The Aliro system is used to provide all the code examples given here, and you can find a site that is running the exact software described in this book at http://packt.aliro.org.

From time to time, you will find mentions of backwards compatibility, mostly in relation to the code examples taken from Aliro. In this context, backwards compatibility should be understood to be features that have been put into Aliro so that software originally designed to run with Mambo (or its various descendants) can be used with relatively little modification in Aliro. The vast majority of the Aliro code is completely new, and no feature of older systems has been retained if it seriously restricts desirable features or requires serious compromise of sound design.

Complete feature of WordPress

WordPress is an open-source blog engine that is developed by Matt Mullenweg and Ryan Boren and released under the GNU General Public License. It's one of the most popular blogging tools among its siblings. WordPress is capable of managing a huge amount of data in a very structured way. Administration of WordPress is very simple, which makes it the first choice for thousands of users.

Before proceeding further, let us see the complete feature list of WordPress:

1. Supports unlimited categories and sub-categories
2. Automatic syndication by RSS and Atom
3. Uses XML RPC interface for trackbacks and remote posting
4. Can cope with email posting
5. Supports plug-ins and themes (skinnable)
6. Password protected to individual posts
7. Features extensive documents and a rich set of APIs
8. Very easy to administer and maintain with no experience
9. Very convenient search facility
10. Instant publishing of content, no matter how long it is
10. Multi-lingual blogging capability
11. Supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards
12. Enable or disable comments on a per-post basis
13. Integrated blacklist & proxy checker to eliminate spam
14. Built-in user registration system
15. Easy installation and upgrades

What is WordPress?

These days, everyone can find a reason for having a website. It's not just the large companies who have a website. Even individuals, families, and small or independent businesses need to have one. Some individuals and small businesses do not have the financial resources to hire a website development company to create a website for them. This is where WordPress comes in. WordPress is a web application that you can use to create and maintain an online website, even if you have a minimum of technical expertise.

Because it is a web application, WordPress does not need to be installed on your home computer. It can live on the computer that belongs to your website hosting company.

Wordpress:

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. WordPress is an open source blog engine. Open source means that nobody owns it, everybody works on it, and anyone can contribute to it. Blog engine means a software that can run a blog. It's a piece of software that lives on the web server and makes it easy for you to add and edit posts, themes, comments, and all of your other content. More expansively, WordPress can be called a publishing platform because it is by no means restricted to blogging.

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

In this article I will focus on web content management, and will only touch upon broader content issues of the document.

A content management system (CMS) is a web application used to manage work flow needed to collaboratively create, edit, review, index, search, publish and archive various kinds of media and text.

What exactly is a Content Management System? To better understand this, let's briefly look at your common, everyday web page. We will have to talk a little about some of the technology of web pages, but it's worth it to understand the power of a CMS.

To start, let's take a look at the historical development of web pages. Conceptually, there are two aspects to a web page: Its content and the presentation of that content. Over the last decade, there has been an evolution of how these two pieces interact:

Static web pages— A static Web page contains content that displays the same way each time the page is requested from a browser. An example of a static Web page is a help page that contains contact information that does not change frequently. A static store page is created using only HTML.

Cascading Style Sheet web pages—CSS is an extension to basic HTML that allows you to style your web pages. Separation of presentation and content is a common in the cascading style sheet web pages.


Dynamic web pages—A dynamic Web page contains content that is generated when the user requests the page. This content is typically extracted from a database, allowing the store to present the most current information. Content and presentation are separated from the web page itself.

Note : A content management system (CMS) is a necessity when maintaining a large corporate website or intranet. CMS supports the creation, management, distribution, publishing, and discovery of corporate information.