Book Image

Choosing an Open Source CMS: Beginner's Guide

By : Nirav Mehta
Book Image

Choosing an Open Source CMS: Beginner's Guide

By: Nirav Mehta

Overview of this book

There are many powerful open source CMSs available to take the pain away from managing a web site. These systems are feature rich, often easy to use, and free. Unfortunately, there are so many choices it's tough to be sure you're choosing the right one. How can you be sure that you are selecting and working with the right tool? This book will guide you through choosing the right CMS for your needs. You can be confident in your choice of CMS for the needs of your project. It will also help you make a start using the CMS, and give you a feel for what it's like to use it ñ even before you install it yourself. Are you bewildered by the many open source CMSs available online? Open source CMSs are the best way to create and manage sophisticated web sites. You can create a site that precisely meets your business goals, and keep the site up to date easily because these systems give you full control over every aspect of your site. Because open source CMSs are free to download, you have a huge amount of choice between the various systems. Yet there are many open source CMSs to choose from, each with unique strengths ñ and occasionally limitations too. Choosing between the bewildering number of options can be tough. Making the wrong choice early on may lead to a lot of wasted work, because you'll have a half-finished site that doesn't meet your initial requirements ñ and needs to be restarted from scratch. This book will show you how to avoid choosing the wrong CMS. It will guide you through assessing your site requirements, and then using that assessment to identify the CMS that will best fit your needs. It contains discussions of the major CMSs, and the issues that you should consider when choosing: their complexity to use, their features and the power they offer. It discusses technical considerations such as programming languages and compliance with best practice standards in a clear, friendly way that non-technical readers can understand. The book also contains quick-start guides and examples for the most popular CMSs such as WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal, so that you can experiment with these CMSs, get a feel for how they work, and start using them to build your site. After reading this book, you can be confident that your CMS choice will support your web site's needs because you have carefully assessed your requirements and explored the available options.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Choosing an Open Source CMS
Credits
About the author
About the reviewers
Preface
13
Hosting your CMS-Powered Site

About the reviewers

Chanh Ong is a Computer Specialist and has many years of experience in various computer platforms and operating systems; programming languages such as PHP, JavaScript (AJAX), C, VB, Perl, Microsoft Access, dBase, and FoxPro; system administration on Unix, Linux, Vax and Microsoft Windows; and DBA of various databases such as Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, Informix, MSSQL, and so on. He utilizes web servers such as Apache and IIS to help build web applications. He also does custom templates for clients.

He has an open source project called COAddOns, which develops several add-ons for Mambo, Joomla!, MiaCMS, and MoseCMS—which is an easy and extensible CMS. He is also a former Mambo CMS core developer.

He researches on CMSs and their tools. He has lot of experience in installing various CMS, including Wiki, and he also sets up sites using Microsoft SharePoint services.

He runs a web site where he blogs about his findings that help him in his research. His web site also provides support for his open source project, COAddOns.

His main web site is http://support.ongetc.com and his Wiki is http://wiki.ongetc.com and his blog is: http://blog.ongetc.com.

He wrote an article for Packt Publishing titled

How to Choose an Open Source Content Management System. You can find it at http://www.packtpub.com/article/how_to_choose_an_open_source_ content_management_system.

Daniel Chapman started his career as an Oracle database consultant and trainer, working for various Australian universities, telecommunication companies, and also Oracle Australia. He developed a keen sense of the value of development standards and analysis processes. After 10 years in this arena, he wanted a change and moved into web development in 2004. He quickly picked up PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS while experimenting with various CMSs.

Finally deciding on Joomla! as his CMS of choice, Daniel initially began working as a consultant developing sites and producing a few small extensions before starting one of the first Open Source Extension Clubs: www.ninjoomla.com. Eventually, he changed the club's name to www.NinjaForge.com, and has become quite well known in the Joomla! sphere.

Jeff Potts is the Director of the Enterprise Content Management Practice at Optaros, a global consulting firm focused on assembling Next Generation Internet solutions featuring open source components. Jeff brings over 10 years of ECM practice leadership and over 17 years of IT and technology implementation experience in IT departments and professional services organizations.

Jeff has a deep technical experience in content management with custom and packaged solutions (commercial and open source). For the last several years, he has focused on Alfresco. But he has also worked with other open source content management technologies including Drupal, WordPress, Zope/Plone, and Apache Cocoon.

Jeff's areas of business expertise include document management, content management, workflow, collaboration, portals, and search. Throughout his consulting career he has worked on a number of projects for Fortune 500 clients across the media & entertainment, airline, consumer packaged goods, and retail sectors.

Jeff is a frequent speaker at Alfresco and Content Management industry events and has written articles for technical journals. Last year he published his first book, the Alfresco Developer Guide (http://www.packtpub.com/alfresco-developer-guide/book).

Jeff blogs on all of these topics at ecmarchitect.com.

Mark Bowen is a web developer, musician, graphic designer, electronics engineer, and helicopter pilot amongst many other talents. He is currently living in Birmingham, United Kingdom. He is an avid Apple Macintosh user and has been so for well over 15 years now.

Mark studied Performing Arts in college and ended up getting a job at the college as a Music Technician. It was during this time that he gained his City & Guilds 224 in Electronics Servicing. So he is qualified to take a TV apart, put it back together again, leave bits out, and still charge for it!

Now working as a Senior Producer for the second largest independent commercial production house in the UK, Mark has made well over 30,000 adverts-jingles-music-based projects in his almost eight years of work there.

Mark has been developing with Adobe Flash, and was asked to review the Advanced PHP for Flash book by Friends Of Ed due to the work he did on a Flash-based chat application.

After Flash, Mark took up learning HTML/CSS, and now codes sites entirely by hand without the use of any WYSIWYG editors. These days, Mark's preferred tool of choice for creating Internet sites is the ExpressionEngine CMS platform. About this platform he states, "It is a designer's dream come true" due to its very nature of keeping code and content completely separate from each other. Mark is an avid reader of the ExpressionEngine forums, and can usually be found there each day answering questions wherever and whenever he can.

He is currently in the process of setting up an aviation-based photography web site with his wife Sarah (who is also a helicopter pilot—Flight Instructor). It will host and sell the most professional images in the world relating to aviation. This came about due to Mark being the sole designer for the largest military helicopter magazine in the world. Through his links with the magazine, he now has access to the best aviation photographers in the business. Keep an eye out on the ExpressionEngine forums for the site's launch!

Sujit Pal started programming some 20 years ago, and never looked back. He currently works at Healthline Networks, Inc., a search vertical focused on health, as a part of its Research and Development team. Apart from his work, his favorite pastime is to explore new software technologies, techniques, and languages. He writes about his experiments at sujitpal.blogspot.com.