Content management system

A content management system is a software which allows a person to manage a website’s content in a systematic and easy way. Gone are the days when websites were created using individual html files.

Now I am going to tell you about my experience using content management systems. First of all, I did not have any idea about CMS. Then My friend told me about Joomla. It is available for free under GNU license. I started using Joomla on one of my site. But to learn using joomla was the biggest task.

I took some 3-4 days reading the online joomla forum articles about the terminologies of joomla and other things. I did not even know that modules existed. At first time I did not use any modules. Somehow I took some 2-3 weeks and built the site using joomla.

Drupal:

Then started the problem for me. I did not have any ideal gallery built in joomla. I had to depend on some gallery modules. But they were not at all useful for me.

At this stage, I heard about drupal. But my friend told me that drupal was difficult to learn. I took some 2-3 days reading some tutorials on their site. But I did not give it a try. Finally I realized that joomla was not offering me anything better. I finally decided to shift to drupal.

When I changed the servers, I installed drupal and started testing it. It was quite easier than joomla and the admin control panel was too good. I can tell you that the admin panel of drupal is one of the best one’s I have seen. If you do not know how to navigate or want a specific function, you can use the slash search on mozilla firefox and type the term. You will get it. Asking how it works? There is a long list of the controls available. And a description is also given in it. Hence it is easy to search what you want.

Modules of Drupal:

There are hundreds and thousands of drupal moduels developed by the community. Each one is so good. I think you should naturally use at least some 10-12 modules to make a standard site. Modules which we cannot live without are XML site map which was developed under the funding of Google summer of code. And the flash tools module, image module and many more. And the themes are good and you have a long list to select from.

Drupal I feel is the best way to manage a site’s content. And you get blogging and community featured by default. Drupal is a database driven software. You need a Apache environment for drupal to work best.

Microsoft server comes along with a CMS software which can generate asp pages. I have no better idea about it. You can go through wikipedia article about the comparision of CMS software. Best article on web for CMS reference.