CMS's: Flying with Jet Fuel

For the most elaborate websites, you should consider a content-management system, or CMS. That’s a mouthful, but it only means software that lets you manage your website content. A good content-management system will let you do everything WordPress can do, and more. A CMS is more general than a blog. The main purpose of a blog is to let you post content day by day, as in a news feed. A CMS can do this, but it can also handle other content, displaying it in a number of ways.

There are a number of alternatives. One popular CMS is Joomla, and DreamHost has a one-click install for it. I prefer Drupal for my websites. For example, LucrativeWebDesign.com runs on Drupal. Both Joomla and Drupal are free software.

Another example is Gilmore-ism.com, my fan site for the TV show Gilmore Girls. Some of the features on this site are custom-programmed, such as the quotes database. The theme is also highly customized. But most of the features on the site use built-in Drupal features or off-the-shelf Drupal modules.

Consider all the ways Drupal helped me put together this site:

• The front-page dashboard is all based on standard features and off-the-shelf modules. The various lists are either standard blocks available from different modules, or they are custom views of the content on the site.
• The “Random Quote” feature is also a custom view of the content, like the lists on the front page. It’s a view of a single, random quote.
• The “RSS” feature is a feed of front-page content. Like a blog feed, this is a Web 2.0 feature that allows users to get an automatic list of the new content on the site.
• The “Content from Other Sites” feature is Web 2.0 at its finest. It automatically republishes a list of links to select sites that themselves have RSS feeds.
• The “Search” feature is built-into Drupal. It automatically searches all the content on the site. There’s also an off-the-shelf alternative that uses Google search.
• Users can register for a free account on the site and submit comments and certain content. This is a built-in feature, and all I needed to do was to enable it.
• Users can rate articles on the site and get recommended content based on their ratings and the ratings of other users. These features were all in off-the-shelf modules. All I needed to do was to install them.

There are plenty of do-it-yourselfers who install and maintain CMS-based websites, using Drupal, Joomla, and other software. You’ll also find consultants and developers who can provide the features that meet your specialized requirements.