Why use a CMS (Content Management System)?

3 March 2009

A CMS (Content Management System) allows users to input their own content and edit it easily.

Content Management Systems quite often have built in functionality such as being able to blog, setting up a forum, displaying a picture album, running a social network and whatever other functionality you can think of.

There are plenty of CMS platforms out there for people to download, and then upload to your own web space. After installing on your web space you can build your template files and add content to your website.

Some of the CMS platforms out there include (but are not limited to):

  • WordPress
  • CakePHP
  • Drupal
  • Joomla
  • Mambo
  • TypePress
  • CMSimple
  • Django

As well as all of these well know CMS platforms, I've also built my own, PJN CMS.

With a Content Management System the user will be able to create new pages, change te navigation order, add content to the pages, add functionality to pages and be able to update the content from any computer as long as they remember the username and password.

The beauty of using a Content Management System is that anyone can have a website, without knowing how to code in PHP or HTML.

The whole website will be consistent in layout and all content added should be compliant with W3C XHTML standards.

http://www.peternichol.com/entry/trackback/38/

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Current comments:

Charlotte says:

Thanks Peter, the littlesmiles link seems to be working for me? hmmm.. taking your comments in, defo something for the future, will pick ur brains about this another time.

5 March 2009 9:31pm

Peter Nichol says:

Hi Charlotte, I don't tend to use other CMS solutions so much as I've built my own and so purely use this one.

However, I do maintain a website using the WordPress CMS platform. I've found WordPress very easy to use, very functional with all the plugins and fairly straight forward.

I had a quick look at your website and would recommend that your blog be a subdomain within your current website, that way the visitors are coming directly to your website (rather than to WordPress) and also having your blog on a subdomain will mean you can use the same template as your main website to keep consistency. If you need any help with this please let me know.

And lastly, on your current website you have a dead link for Littlesmiles-photography. I see that you've said it's coming soon - but if search engines notice you're linking to dead, 404 Error, websites they may penalise you slightly for this.

4 March 2009 10:57pm

Charlotte says:

This is a useful bit of info Peter- I am working on a website at the moment requiring easily updatable pages client end-was thinking of using wordpress(as thats who I use for my blog http://meemu.wordpress.com/ ) do you have any recommendations?

4 March 2009 10:14pm