Whats a CMS, and can I have an example

MungoMan

I shouldnt be asking the above question, because I work in the IT industry.

My experience in the web is with the web application framework, ASP.net, I know this technology fairly well.


I dont know what a CMS is, I know it stands for a content management system...........

Can someone give an example of who would use a CMS, and why

For example, if I develop a simple static website, and publish it on a webserver with ftp, where does a CMS become necessary, how does a CMS fit into a website ?

I'm just looking for a real world example of a cms and why it would be used

DonkeyStyle \o/

Well say you have a site with multiple contributors who need to update it twice a day, they don't want to be uploading over eachothers changes via FTP, and maybe they're not that technical anyway. You can provide someone with a web-facing interface that's as easy and fast to use as web-mail, where they can add content without having to worry about markup or having specific software installed at their location or on what ever web-enabled device they happen to be using.
So I'd say the benefits for the publisher/editor are speed, simplicity and flexability.

A CMS fits in where the site's content is stored in (and pulled from) a database.
The CMS provides an easy interface to that database... while the code responsible for building the resulting output page from that content is kept out of the way.

There's also a benefit of having all of these pages built from a small number of theme/template files... having your content in a database can be one more step in seperating content from presentation, since it gets that bit more granular, you can make site-wide changes like putting all your article titles in <h2>'s instead of <h1>'s for example.

Another benefit is that there are a certain amount of files, let's call it the core of the CMS, that you never need to change... since these files don't need to be changed, they can be considered standard, and depended upon across any given install of that CMS... this allows plugins and widgets to be designed and shared between users of that CMS.
If you look at wordpress (because I'm familiar with it), using it gives you access to a tonne of plugins to save you re-inventing the wheel or having to fiddle too much with integrating it... it gets as simple as drag & drop.

It's probabaly not worth using one for a small, static site that only needs the rare update though.

BostonB

Another thing they do is control permission to making and publishing edits to certain people or groups. They can also have a built in approval process where one group makes edits and another approve it for publishing. Some also can handle localisation where different languages can be handled. Some also control versioning.

http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=Versioning
http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-index.php

Sites that publish a lot of content from different authors and editors are most likely to use them. Newspapers, public bodies, large companies with large websites.

Zascar

I'm no developer but I've been building websites for years as a hobby and a little earner on the side. I have not coded in years, cms is the way ahead check out www.wordpress.org - an absolutely amazing cms for simple websites - blog based but you can make fully fleged websites with it, and also www.joomla.org too - which is bigger and more able for proper websites. Both are open source and have a huge developer community who help make the program better by building extensions or plugins. With a plugin, you can have a basic normal website, add a plugin to it in a few minutes, and massivly expand your website capabilities onto it - in a minute fraction of the time it would take you to do it yourself. Also there are thousands of really well designed themes/templates available for both, mostly free but you can get some excellent premium ones for very cheap too - www.themeforrest.com is a good place to look

Generally if you are looking for something very unique and special maybe a custom build is necessary but I'd definitely be looking into a cms if its any form of normal typ website

Oh also check out drupal and dejango which re more like deveopment frameworks - some really fantastic stuff can be build with these...

MungoMan

Thanks for the great replies

In my situation, I use ASP.net to write web applications, these web access legacy databases, and call web services, and a lot of coding needs to be done in vb.net or some other .net language to achieve what you are trying to do, and they incorporate a lot of technology like javascript, ajax.

If someone does a website with Joomla, or wordpress, would they be able to do the same stuff as is possible with .Net, would they be able to interact with other databases with odbc and call stored procedures, and have ajax and javascript.....

Or is it just for fairly simple static content websites ?

For example, if I wanted an e-commerce system, allowing the user to browse a catalog of products and buy one of them and take a payment, I know I could do it in .Net by doing a lot of coding

But could I do the same thing in Joomla or Wordpress ?

PeakOutput

MungoMan wrote: »

But could I do the same thing in Joomla or Wordpress ?

joomla and wordpress can do everything you can do with .php its just a way of managing everything

drupal is another one and im currently having a huge website with loads of features and a store developed in drupal

wordpress is for everyone very user friendly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordpress

joomla is more powerful but still very user and non tech minded friendly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joomla

drupal is the least user friendly but probably the most powerful and capable of having massive and complicated sites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal

Pixelcraft

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