A CMS, or Content Management System is defined by Wikipedia as
... a computer system that allows publishing, editing, and modifying content as well as site maintenance from a central page. It provides a collection of procedures used to manage workflow in a collaborative environment...
They provide a mechanism whereby anyone, irrespective of his or her knowledge of computer languages such as HTML or CSS can create a sophisticated site and invite friends, colleagues, of people with a shared interest to add their own material.
Back End
In the back end of your site - the end that only you and your co-administrators see, the CMS provides the substructure necessary to build a commercial site such as:
- Access control through 'login' and 'register' procedures
- Logical data organisation allowing visitors to find what they want or need quickly and intuitively
- Menus Searches and links
- Blogs, forums and comments
The Front End
The visitor to your site sees none of this. What he or she sees as a single integrated webpage actually consists of:
- Articles - the main body of text and pictures - your content - that you and your visitors add to the site
- Blocks - usually part of the side-bars, header and footer that may include snippets of content but more often contain functional content like your login block, menus, special offers etc. Blocks - particularly menu blocks - often appear on several pages and may appear conditionally - ie the login block may disappear once a visitor logs in.
- The Theme which controls the webpage's look: the width and location of the sidebars, the fonts and colour of the text, the artwork in your header, the overall colour scheme
Of course, you don't have to make all these links, the software searches the data base for the elements of a page, sorts them, combines them and presents them on the screen. You simply generate the content.
WYSIWYG and Wiki Sites
Modules and eCommerce
- WYSIWYG is an acronym for 'what you see is what you get'. It is the function that allows anyone who can type in a word processor to cut and paste material into your site - provided he or she qualifies through the login system.
- Wiki sites are sites, like Facebook or Wikipedia, where the content is generated by the visitors. CMS sites allow your site to be a Wiki.Many eCommerce sites are in fact CMS sites; some with the community aspects suppressed, others with them intact. In neither of the CMS packages we investigate, 'Joomla' and 'Drupal' are the eCommerce packages part of the core download, but both can be extended quite simply by downloading additional eCommerce Modules.
- Modules extend the functionality of the CMS core. Some modules allow you to create picture galleries, others help with the Search Engine Optimisation, others add commercial capabilities.
- eCommerce modules such as Drupal Commerce provide a full commercial capability with Shop Front with Ubercart, Shipping, Stock Management, Coupons, File downloads, PayPal, and many more...
Roger Webb is a retired CEO from Small and Medium Sized (SME) companies in the UK and Continental Europe. In thirty years' experience at life at the top he has been instrumental in turning around and setting up a number of specialist subsidiaries in Europe, Africa and beyond, in every case producing stable profits in some of the most testing corporate environments imaginable.
Finding retirement a bore, he set up two social networking sites gathering up the business experience and knowledge of their members and visitors.
The first, http://computer-virgin.net deals with the issues raised when a newcomer sets out to start a new business from scratch.
The second, http://mywebtrade.net builds on the first and covers the issues specific to on-line business.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Roger_J_Webb
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7136288
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