What is a Content Management System?
Wednesday, 09 July 2008 14:41
There has been a lot of talk about Content Management Systems (CMS) for the past few years, but there are still many people out there with many questions concerning CMSs. How is a CMS different from a static website? What types of CMSs are there? How much do they cost?
CMS vs. Static Site
A static site consists of pages. Each page has links to other pages on the same site and, when designed correctly, appear to be a cohesive website. However, the site exists as multiple separate HTML files somewhere in cyberspace. This is equivalent to having a Microsoft Word Open Office Writer (I like to promote open source software when I can) document for each page of your site. A CMS is more like Word Writer than a page. A CMS provides functionality to add, delete and manage pages; and may include search features, blogging features, templates and other add-ons.
Available CMSs
Many moons ago, CMSs were only available to the largest corporations who had marketing budgets of thousands of dollars. Today, thanks to open source communities, there are more freely available CMSs than I can list here. As a web developer, there are two CMSs that I use quite often: Joomla and WordPress.
WordPress is marketed as a blogging solution, but it is really much more than that. WordPress allows the ability to add and manage web pages and blog posts. It is extremely easy to setup and is one of the most thoroughly documented open source projects that I have run into. WordPress also offers many free add-ons called widgets that can add increased functionality to your website. If you are looking for a relatively small website with advanced blogging features, WordPress may be the solution you're looking for.
Joomla is used around the world to power small personal websites to huge corporate websites. Out of the box it allows setup of a fully-featured website with no programming knowledge (of course custom features, designs, etc. do increase the learning curve). But Joomla is even more than this. For a developer with good programming skills, Joomla is a complete web framework on which one can build highly complex and customized web applications.
Price
We discussed the fact that there are many solutions out there that can be downloaded at no charge. So why are we talking price? There are plenty of people out there who can check the air pressure in tires of their car, maybe even change the oil; but what if you need your transmission rebuilt, or what if you don't have a car, would you build one from scratch? Probably not. Unless you want to use the default settings implementing a CMS can get tricky rather quickly. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of 'accidental techies' out there that can probably do a pretty good job at setting up something basic, but once we want to start customizing features it may be time to start looking for some outside help.
So what can you expect to pay? Again, that's kind of like asking how much a car costs. It varies. I charge anywhere from $1,000 and up. Some charge more and some charge less. The best idea is to put together a written Request for Proposals (RFP) and get a couple of different bids from a couple of different consultants.
Next Steps
A great site to visit is OpenSourceCMS. OpenSourceCMS offers the ability to test drive quite a few open source CMSs. Of course you should visit the websites of some of the major players. These include: Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and Plone.
