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Content Management Systems
One of the most innovative
benefits of dynamic web programming is content management
systems that make the life of internet content editors
easy and their work visually attractive.
Imagine that you are the editor of an
online newspaper or magazine. You are creative in your
writings and very knowledgeable about the content you
write about. However, these skills alone are not good
enough to be able to work in an online “news”
source. You must have at least the very basic knowledge
on the functions and the tags of HTML (Hypertext Markup
Language). You must be able to create codes for the
presentations of your articles. This process of writing
web articles can be very frustrating (and exhausting)
if you have never heard about CMS’s (Content Management
Systems).
Content Management Systems are almost
like personal automated web page authors. You write
your articles, surveys, and rating systems as if you
are using a word processor or a visual editing program.
Driven by the data you put in, the CMS stores all of
these in a database and then translates them into HTML.
CMS basically acts like a translator between you and
the browsers by creating very user friendly graphical
interfaces.
CMS generally have a front-end and a
back-end. The front-end obviously refers to the face
of the site that each visitor sees. The back-end is
the user-friendly graphical interface where you can
edit your content or the template with the help of the
many wizards that are supplied by these systems. Let’s
say you needed to write a code for a user-upload function
in the site, or a survey system that would enable users
to vote on your articles; you don’t even need to
touch Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or any kind of HTML editor;
there are already hundreds of modules that are written
for different CMS’s. You just download the module
to your server and install it.
There are loads of CM systems online
that are presented as freeware. However, below are two
suggestions for different user groups;
Typo3: If you think yourself a professional
and think that you can deal with some PHP coding, this
robust and very flexible system is just for you.
Mambo: If you say “No, thanks.
I don’t want to deal with PHP coding, I am doing
this as a hobby”, then Mambo should be your choice
since it does not require the user to change much and
is already supported by many ready-to-install modules
and templates.
In summary, CMS makes our life much
easier then before and our sites much more attractive.
They are the “operating systems”, personal
coders and free translators of the web.
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