CMS. Three of the most wonderful words in an adult webmaster's vocabulary: Content Management System. Not quite as wonderful as a million-dollar website but pretty damned close.
What does it mean, this funky term with the innocuous acronym? What is a Content Management System? Do I need one? How do I get one? Will it make my life easier or will it just be one more piece of software I can neither understand nor find justification for using?
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"No more hand coding page by page. No more uploading file by file. Tedium reduced. Productivity increased." |
All good questions. Our mother's suggestion to ignore peer pressure pays off when it comes to adopting new technologies. We can't be jumping on the latest bandwagon simply because the cool kids are doing it. Why take the time to study and master a tool if you don't need it? You're just a punk webmaster, trying anything and everything that you can to make a buck. You're small-time and don't have some massive store of content, websites and affiliate accounts. Then again, if you keep doing this, you will eventually possess massive amounts of something.
My favorite thing about blog software is that I can use it as an example of what CMS can do. If you've not used blog software, it's fairly simple to describe. Blog software enables you to build a database-driven website that automatically updates, tags, categorizes, syndicates and archives everything with the click of a button. From images, to rotating banners, to adding social networking widgets, blog software allows you to personalize your design in clean templates, standardized across your site, via CSS. No more hand coding page by page. No more uploading file by file. Tedium reduced. Productivity increased.
Blog software is the most familiar example of CMS but not the only one. From Drupal toJoomla, to Django to Website Publisher, there's a CMS that will suit your needs as well as your platform preferences. Arguably, the most popular CMS platforms are written in PHP and use the MySQL database. Whatever your preference, chances are you're going to find a CMS that will manage your sites no matter how large or small.
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With CMS you'll be able to take your images, videos, templates, and ads and organize them so that they can be updated, archived and accessed with ease. You can set up editor/contributor accounts for your employees. You can create a social network. You can control the whole thing from an online dashboard and can even post entries via email. Moderate comments. Approve users. Block spam. Ping RSS syndicates. All with the click of a submit button.
Here, at Cozy, we're adamant that adult webmasters learn HTML and some coding. We still believe that HTML mastery is necessary but it would irresponsible for us to ignore the importance of learning additional programming languages like PHP. The encouraging thing is, once you've mastered HTML, new languages like PHP are easier to comprehend. As stated above, you're probably going to pick a PHP-based CMS and that means you're going to need to familiarize yourself Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and composing pages that end with the file format .php instead of .html.
We recommend you start out easy. Get yourself a copy of WordPress and install it to your server. Once you've got the database configured and tweaked the settings, we're confident that you're going to fall in love with the CMS way of doing things. Mind you, big-deal web page editor like Dreamweaver contains some powerful management tools but Dreamweaver costs 400 hundred dollars while there are many Content Management Systems that cost nothing because they are Open Source. Dreamweaver is a masterful software program but CMS can do more and you can access it from anywhere because the database is online as opposed to a local install.
You may feel you're not "big enough" to need CMS but the day will arrive when you will have a lot of content, hundreds of pages and sponsor ads. When that day arrives, and you're transferring all your stuff to your CMS database you'll wish you had started earlier. You'll be kicking yourself for having been so resistant to CMS. You'll wonder what took you so long to adopt this amazingly helpful technology.