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CMS :: What's It For? Do You
Need It...?
There are essentially two ways in which
web sites are typically created and published. The ‘traditional’ way
is to design each page, one by one, using HTML and then
upload it to the web site. Once the page is online it
won’t change unless you redesign it and upload
the new version.
The alternative way is to have pages generated ‘on
the fly’ by a Content Management System (CMS).
New data is added by one or more authors and the pages
themselves are created programmatically by combining
the data with a pre-designed page layout or ‘template’.
CMSes come in many varieties and some of them are highly
specialised for specific tasks. In general, however,
when people talk about a CMS they mean a system that
publishes articles and images contributed by one or more
authors. One of the most popular applications of CMS
software is the publication of Blogs.
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Not all blogs are simple one-person daily diaries.
The German media group, Stern, publishes quite a
large site containing numerous blogs written by its
journalists. That site uses the pLog 'multi-blogging'
CMS. |
Blog Off!
At its simplest, a Blog (short for ‘web log’)
may be nothing more than a daily diary. At regular intervals
the author logs into the Blog management software and
jots down his or her thoughts for the day. The new entry
is saved onto the web server and when someone visits
the Blog site, that entry will appear at the top of the
page while all the earlier ones are shifted down or moved
onto other pages in the ‘archive’. The important
thing, from the author’s point of view, is that
the Blog can be created and maintained just by writing
text or uploading images. It isn’t necessary to
write any HTML. Nor it is necessary to cut and paste
text in order to move older messages from the front page
and into the archive.
From the end user’s perspective, the simplest
way of creating a Blog would be to sign onto a ready-to-use
Blogging service such as Blogger. The disadvantage of
such service is that you have relatively little
control over the way in which your Blog operates. You
will be able to redesign the page layout to some extent
(and you’ll probably need to do at least a bit
of HTML hacking for that), but you probably won’t
be able to add additional authors or publish categorised ‘sections’ such
as News, Opinion, Reviews and so forth.
| NOTE: See the April 2005 Rants
and Raves column for a review of Blogger and
other free Blogging services. Some changes may have
been made to these since that article was written
(for example, it is now easier to upload images to
Blogger). As they are all free, the best way to find
out if they are to your liking is to give them a
test run! |
To take full control of your Blog, you need to install
and run a CMS/Blogging system on your own web server.
The features of each CMS/Blogging system vary. However,
most of them at least allow you to have more than one
author and assign different ‘permission’ levels
to each. For example, the person running the Blog will
have full ‘administrator’ permissions to
add, delete and edit just about anything. Another person
who contributes to the Blog may be restricted to adding
and editing news items and may be unable to access any
other categories in the Blog.
Typically when a new item is added, it may be assigned
one or more categories as designated by the administrator.
For example, you may have categories called Fred, Bert,
News and Reviews. Maybe a user called Fred has access
to the Fred and News categories while a user called Bert
has access to the Bert and Reviews categories. The administrator
may set up the CMS system such that any post in the Bert category is added to a section called ‘Bert’s
Blog’. Posts in the News category are added to
the ‘News’ section and so on.
It may also be possible to display entries from multiple
Blogs or sections on a single ‘digest’ page.
For example, you could create a section called ‘All
The Latest Posts’ which publishes the ten newest
posts from the Fred, Bert, News and Reviews categories.
Beyond the Blog
From the description above you can see that what started
as a simple Blog might eventually turn into a more complicated
type of publication. If you have separate sections for
Bert’s and Fred’s Blogs, other sections for
News and Reviews, plus a digest of all the latest posts
on the front page, you are, in effect, publishing a kind
of web magazine rather than just a personal diary.
When publishing a site with numerous linked sections
and a large number of contributing authors, it might
be better to use a so-called CMS portal rather than a
Blog system. The definition of a ‘portal’ is
somewhat open to interpretation. Typically, a CMS portal
is simply bigger and more complex than a CMS Blog. It
may be used for projects such as multi-author books (though,
in fact, another type of CMS software called a Wiki specialises
in this), or community-based sites in which a large number
of contributors in addition to the ‘editorial team’ are
able to add items. Some portals also include additional
features such as built-in advertising management, polls
and discussion forums.
While CMS portals may have more power than CMS Blogs,
that power often comes at a price - namely, complexity.
Some CMS Blogs are more or less ready to run. You install
them, set up a few essential details such as users and
categories and you can immediately start adding content.
A CMS portal, having so many more features, can’t
assume that a Blog is what you want to create. As a consequence,
you may have to put a good deal of effort into the creation
of a workable system, tailored to your own requirements.
In fact, the distinction between a CMS portal and a
CMS Blog is not invariably that clear-cut. Some CMS Blogs
have so many built-in features supplemented by optional
add-on modules that they can be used to create web ‘community’ projects
in much the same way as the ‘portals’.
But Do You Really Need
It…?
Don’t be
fooled into thinking that CMS is the answer to all
your problems. For many web sites, static pages created
in HTML and uploaded whenever changes are made is
still the best solution. CMS is great if you make
regular additions of data (to a Blog, say) and use
a unified layout for most of the pages on the site.
CMS is also great if you have many authors contributing
regularly to your site. But CMS has no particular
advantages for a site in which the content of each
individual page changes rarely or never. Nor is it
ideally suited for a site on which each page may
be designed with a significantly different layout.
For the record, Bitwise is done in the good old fashioned
way. Most of our pages are ‘static’ -
once they’re published, they’re published
and will be rarely if ever changed. Moreover, while
we have an overall consistent design to our pages,
the actual layout of text, code and graphics, varies
greatly from one page to another, so we feel that
CMS currently has little to offer to us. If, however,
we add new sections to Bitwise at a later stage
in which the content is likely to require more
regular updating (news pages, discussion groups,
collaborative projects - who knows?), then a CMS
would certainly be something we would seriously
consider. |
Decisions, Decisions…
We shall be looking at a number of Content Management
Systems in detail over the coming months. What we can’t
do, however, is tell you which one is ‘the best’.
That all depends on what you need to do and how you plan
to do it. A CMS which is perfect for an experienced PHP
programmer planning a complex multi-user community site
may be useless for a novice user who just wants to write
a web diary. What we can do is to suggest some of the
questions you may need to ask when you try to assess
whether a particular system is right for you. Here are
some ideas…
| NOTE: Predominantly, Open Source
CMSes are written in PHP. There are exceptions to
the rule, however. Plone, for example, is written
using the Python language http://plone.org/ . Others,
such as Bricolage http://bricolage.cc/, are written
in Perl. |
What features should you look for?
Think about this carefully: Do you want a Blog? A forum?
Collaborative documentation? Polls? Image galleries?
The ability to have multiple sections with entries selectively
shared across those sections?
Ease of setup
How easy is it to install onto a web server or a home
PC? Be careful. They all say they are easy. Search around
for real user accounts of setup problems before taking
the claims at face value.
Ease of design and templates
If you want to customise the look of your pages, how
easy is this? Do you need to be familiar with HTML and
CSS? Do you have to know how to use PHP? What about pre-designed
templates - are there lots of nice ready-to-use templates
freely available ?
Ease of maintenance
Many CMS systems underestimate the difficulties of configuring
and running the software. Once again, search for existing
users’ stories of the problems they’ve faced.
Also, be sure to try out the admin panels in the active
demo installations of many CMS products at: http://www.opensourcecms.com/
Ease Of Use
How easy is it to log in and post messages? Does it
have a WYSIWYG text editor? Are there any other ‘user-friendly’ tools
such as a spelling checker? How easy is it to assign
categories to a new post and upload images? In short,
if non-technical users are going to be let loose on this,
will they be able to cope?
Ease of Data Import / Export
Data exchange is not taken anything like as seriously
as it should be by the developers of most CMS software.
Some of them at least make an effort to import data from
a few of the well established CMS packages. Very few
indeed provide an export facility. As a result, you may
find yourself ‘locked in’ to a CMS with no
easy escape route. If you want to be
able to have the option to leave and take your data with
you, either check whether there is a data export feature
or choose one of the well established CMSes whose data
can imported into rival systems.
Language support
If your native language is not English, what support
does the CMS offer for other languages? Can it automatically
display dates and times in different languages? Does
it support the character set of the language? Does it
have documentation or an online community of users in
your language?
Multi-blogging
If you need several blogs, can you administer multiple
blogs from a single control panel? Can you gather posts
from multiple blogs onto a single ‘digest’ page?
Activity of Development
How long has this CMS project been going? How many people
are involved in its development? Are regular bug-fixes
and updates being released? Are many people developing
add-ons and modules? While there is no guarantee that
a CMS with 100 developers is going to be any better than
a CMS with one, you may want to check that a CMS is not
slowly dying from lack of development. Also, what happens
if the one man in a one-man project finds he has too
many other things to do with his time…? Will there
be other programmers ready and able to continue developing
the software?
Documentation and community
How well is this CMS documented? Has it got a proper
manual? Is there a collaborate book (Wiki)? If so, how
much of the system is thoroughly documented and how many
items are just marked as ‘to be done’? Also,
check on the forum (if there is a forum). How many members
does it have? How many people post there each day? Try
asking a (sensible) question on the forum. Do you receive
a sensible (and helpful) answer? In short, if you run
into problems with this CMS at some time, will there
be people who will be able to help you solve it?
In addition to the above, there are many other factors
you may want to consider such as the speed, security
and efficiency of a given CMS. Unfortunately, these are
all rather difficult to assess at the outset though,
as always, it’s worth searching the forums for
comments from existing users. As a general rule, if there
is a large and satisfied community of users plus an active
development and support community, it’s probably
reasonable to suppose that the CMS can’t be grindingly
inefficient and that, when security issues arise (as
they almost certainly will), there is a good chance that
someone will try to fix them…
October 2005 |
