CMS Content Management Systems

What is a CMS? Creation and management system for websites Wikipedia.org definition: A content management system (CMS) is a computer program that allows publishing, editing and modifying content on a web site as well as maintenance from a central interface. Such systems of content management provide procedures to manage workflow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual steps or an automated cascade.

Most Popular CMS Choices WordPress (most popular, simple) Joomla (simple and powerful) ModX (similar to Joomla) TextPattern (great for blogging) RefineryCMS Drupal (most control for developers) Concrete 5 DotNetNuke (ASP) Umbraco (ASP) TinyCMS (difficult to setup)

Drupal History Dries Buytaert – President, Founder, and Project Lead of Drupal While at the University of Belgium – Antwerp, Buytaert saw a need for a simple way to share and discuss things online. He began working on a simple news website with a built-in discussion board for friends to leave notes for each other. Dries and his friends began to fill up the news site, which didn’t have a name until he graduated and the friends decided to put the site live for them to keep in touch. Dries wanted dorp.org (which means Village in Dutch), but made a typo and bought drop.org. The drop.org community began to change into IT folks, programmers, etc… talking about technology. In January 2001, Dries released the source code behind drop.org as “Drupal”, which is the English pronunciation of the Dutch word for drop (druppel).

Modular Design When you need a particular set of functionality on your Drupal site, you download and install the modules needed. This modularity essentially gives a completely custom set of tools to a designer creating their site. Modular designs are faster to create, faster to update and upgrade, and simpler to publish because when the designer wants functionality, there’s no need to create something new. There are plenty of modules out there the designer can simply download, install, and customize to fit their needs without the need to re- create something unique.

Installation of a CMS All CMS install slightly different, but there are a lot of commonalities. Download, unzip, rename the folder to something simple, and upload to your web server Open your browser to follow the instructions. You’ll need to use phpMyAdmin to create a database for the CMS to use. I suggest a database by the name of the CMS (ie: drupal) with a user account and password that is secure. Don’t use “root”.

Updating your CMS Once you have installed your CMS, visit the Administrator section and, in the case of Drupal, visit the Status Page. From there, run CRON, which will check on updates needed for the site. Anytime you install a new module or theme, you must run CRON. Other CMS are different in their update methodology, but a quick search on Google will show you how to update them.

Customizing you CMS order.html gathers data and sends it to order.php for verification Nothing is written to the database…data is just reprinted on the screen Spring2011/Lecture5/orders/

orderdb.html & orderdb.php orderdb.html gathers data and sends it to orderdb.php for verification orderdb.php inputs that data into a database for storage using fields corresponding to the form variables Spring2011/Lecture5/orders/

orderdboutput.html & orderdboutput.php orderdboutput.html provides a login form for a user to log in and view the contents of the database table orderdboutput.php grabs the entered username/password, checks it against the databse, then displays the table records in an organized HTML table Spring2011/Lecture5/orders/