Re: Content management systems

[Shay Telfer]

On 4/11/2009 1:08 PM, Peter Bull wrote:


A mate of mine asked me about Content management systems or CMS so that
he can upload pics and content to his website. I know very little about
them - is their a favourite package? Are they just an integrated web
authoring tool with built in FTP to upload content?

Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Peter Bull
pb...@bbnet.com.au


Depends what he wants.

For blogs there is software like Wordpress, or sites like Wordpress.org 
and Blogspot.


For photos there's software like Gallery, or sites like flickr, 
mobileme, picasa, etc.


More generally there are CMS's like plone, drupal and Joomla.

Some things to consider:
* Do they want the photos to be accessible to everyone, only their 
friends, or some other arbitrary groupings?

* Are they writing articles to go along with the photos?
* Is the content updated in a linear blog-style?
* Are they going to run ads?
* Is the audience local or based somewhere else in the world?

If you want to compare CMS's there's the CMSMatrix site

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

Have fun,
Shay


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Re: Content management systems

[Glenn Nicholas]

Hi Peter,

Older style static HTML/XHTML web sites work by having actual
HTML/XHTML files that you copy to a web server using ftp. To change a
web page, you change the file.

The newer generation of websites based on a Content Management System
(CMS) store a representation of the web pages in a database (often
MySQL, if it is an open source CMS).  When a page is requested by the
web server, the CMS gets the content from the database and with a bit
of magic converts that into an HTML/XHTML web page which is sent off
to the web server. Using a CMS you are just changing the content, not
a static web page, and as soon as the content is updated, the next
time a page is served it uses the fresh content. No ftp involved.

An easy (and free) way to see how this all works is to go to
http://wordpress.com and sign up for a free WordPress blog. You'll be
able to log in to your site and use the WordPress dashboard to update
your content, upload images etc.  WordPress.com is a fully hosted
option, you can also go to WordPress.org, download the open source
software (free) and follow the instructions to install on your own
server. You'll need to have Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP)
installed and running on your server. You can install WordPress on
OS/X as well, as it has the LAMP stack available. But you'll find the
WordPress.com option an easy way to find out what it is all about.

WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are the 3 major CMS' that run on LAMP.
All of them let you build complete websites, with web pages,
integrated blogs and various other options.

Glenn Nicholas
OM4 ::


2009/11/4 Peter Bull pb...@bbnet.com.au:

 A mate of mine asked me about Content management systems or CMS so that he
 can upload pics and content to his website. I know very little about them -
 is their a favourite package? Are they just an integrated web authoring tool
 with built in FTP to upload content?

 Any help or advice would be appreciated.

 Peter Bull
 pb...@bbnet.com.au



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Content management systems

[Peter Bull]

A mate of mine asked me about Content management systems or CMS so  
that he can upload pics and content to his website. I know very little  
about them - is their a favourite package? Are they just an integrated  
web authoring tool with built in FTP to upload content?


Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Peter Bull
pb...@bbnet.com.au



-- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List --
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