Content Management?

[Rustvaar]

I've been dabbling in web-design for a good few years now. Similar to my dabbling in other areas I tend not to progress to complete works even though having quite a good knowledge; one thing that has been seriously bugging me as of late is "content management".

To my eyes/ears (however you wish to perceive the online reading experience) it looks/sounds like a fancy way of saying "Updating your news-posts without having to personally FTP in and alter HTML code".

Upload your document and it'll "work", as it were.

I've heard PHP mentioned, but again - I don't know much about it, so I am left a little confused and bewildered.

Can anyone help me out? Once A website is up and running and say you're handing it over to someone else to run; they'll need this content management as a means of not messing things up.

A point in the right direction would be wonderful - I don't really know what I'd Google for either, I'm quite lost - I've heard of Joomla, which I've seen in action and strongly dislike - how does it work for somewhere like Interlopers?

[ShaDoW]

Interlopers works mainly through the forum. Something is posted in a special forum section which is then fed onto the main website for e.g. news.

A nice 'CMS' for a small website could be Cutenews. Since it doesn't use MySQL to store information but instead writes everything into HTML documents. It comes with a small and simple back-end website through which you write news, which then appears on your website by using only one line of code.

Two more advanced systems are Wordpress or my personal favorite ExpressionEngine.

Note that Wordpress is more for blogging while Cutenews is more of a simple news feed solution. ExpressionEngine on the other hand is quite advanced and lets you do a ton of things with it.

[Rustvaar]

I knew I should have been saying 'CMS', drat!

I had heard of WordPress, the ethereal figure that is/was Matteh originally created the www.rustvaar.interlopers.net website with that as it's means of updating and it worked very well.

I'll look into Cutenews and Expression Engine.

Thanks ShaDoW - a really helpful response, mate!

[ShaDoW]

My pleasure mate.

Keep in mind though, that when it comes to integrating these systems with your website, things can get a bit tricky.

Cutenews is the easiest, where you just create your website and input the line of code where you want your news to be. Think of it as a script which you include with your website. While ExpressionEngine and Wordpress use a similar system of specifying where you want news and such, they use themes which you can create yourself and are much more integrated with the CMS.

[Forceflow]

The other option is using a wiki-based system (like the excellent PmWiki) and dressing it up as a CMS. I've had good experiences with that.

Other good CMS'es are ModX and Joomla, indeed.

[theblahman]

I've found wordpress is pretty easy to fiddle with.