Hundreds of Web pages on your site mean hundreds of pages of content that
you have to deal with. That’s a massive undertaking for even the most industrious
of Web site owners. Fortunately, tools are available — known as content
management systems — to help you manage your content without driving yourself
completely into a coma, and some of them won’t even make you crazy.
A content management system is a piece of software that’s used for organizing
and facilitating what’s referred to as the collaborative creation of documents
and other content. In other words, content management systems help
you to create and manage the content on your Web site. For example, if you
have a set of articles that you want to first feature on your Web site and then
have moved to an archival section when a new article is featured, a content
management system helps you do that without having to build a new Web
page every time you change the feature articles.
The problem with content management systems is that if you get a proprietary
system — a system built specifically to meet your content management
needs — you’ll pay upward of $100,000. If you fork over that amount
of dough, you can rotate articles from features to archives to your heart’s
content and even set it up so that several people can seamlessly contribute
to blogs on your site. This might all sound dandy, but just keep in mine that if
you’re having the system designed specifically for you, you’ll shell out some
serious coin to have it done.
You don’t have to use a proprietary system, though. Several open source software
applications for content management exist.
Open source software is software that’s created by an individual or company
and then shared freely with others. Others can use the software and even
change it to specifically meet their needs, without having any expenses to
worry about.
The only real drawback to open source content management systems is that
you either have to be very knowledgeable in certain types of programming
or you have to hire someone who is knowledgeable to take care of it for you.
True, you could pick up some good books on the topic, but if you’re not a
code jockey, you’ll find that the books probably leave you a little lost.
Still, if you think you can handle the challenge, Drupal is a good open source
content management system, and believe it or not, so is the blogger’s friend,
WordPress. Okay, I know WordPress is usually thought of as being a blogging
system, but it can also be used as a content management system. If you’re
intrigued, check out the next sections.
WordPress as a content
management system
Although WordPress is primarily known as a blogging tool, it really is much
more. With a few modifications — a couple plugins and custom templates — it’s
possible to use WordPress as a content management system. In one sense,
WordPress is already a content management system because it’s a blog application.
All blog applications are essentially content management systems
because they allow you to create, share, and store content from a single location.
By modifying WordPress just a little, you can also use it for other content
management functions, such as managing
Portfolio sites
News and magazine sites
Article libraries
Gallery sites
Photologs
E-commerce sites
WordPress site designs are based on the idea of themes. Themes are basically
design templates that can be uploaded to your server and then assigned from
within the WordPress Control Panel. The beautiful thing about templates or
themes is the ability to alter them. WordPress and other blog platforms tend
to use a lot of proprietary code that can be difficult to get just right when
you’re putting together a design template. By relying on a pre-designed template,
you can focus on editing the graphics and moving snippets of code
around to get the design that you want.
WordPress also has a handy little feature — Page Management — that allows
you to create static Web pages — pages that always remain the same. You
can create top-level pages that show in the navigation bar of your Web site or
you can create lower-level pages that live underneath your main navigation
topics. These secondary pages appear as drop-down navigation under the
main links in your navigation bar.
Other features of WordPress include a built-in blog roll, which makes creating
a list of related links as simple as filling out a small form to add a new
listing. The best part? No HTML is required to do this. The WordPress panel
also allows site owners to quickly change the appearance of their sites by
switching from one theme to another as simply as selecting a new theme.
WordPress does the rest.
WordPress also has plugin capabilities, meaning you can ‘plug in’ small additional
bits of code that someone else creates to add functionality to your
WordPress site. Examples of plugins are the capability to use WordPress
as a content management system, or even features you can add to your
WordPress blog, like a picture viewer or video player.
Plugin management is mostly seamless in WordPress, and that’s where you
find the real benefit of using WordPress as a content management system.
Plenty of plugins are available, and there are usually detailed instructions for
installing and using those plugins.
Going forward with WordPress
You don’t have to be a certified geek to use WordPress as a content management
system, but there is a learning curve, and it can take a while to traverse.
If you want to find out more about installing and customizing WordPress
to be your content management system — no matter what type of Web site
you’ve created — check out WordPress For Dummies, by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
and Matt Mullenweg. If you prefer getting your info right from the source,
grab the WordPress Codex at http://codex.wordpress.org. The Codex
is nothing more than a fancy name for the user manual. (If you don’t know
where to find it, you could spend days searching for it.)
If you’re trying to populate hundreds of pages and keep the content on those
pages fresh, a content management system helps you automate the process.
If you don’t have such a system in place, you might as well go ahead and shine
up your coffin now because you’ll run yourself into the grave trying to keep up.
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