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 this book


This book walks you through understanding your requirements by elaborating on the different options available for your CMS, and thus helps you make a choice. It then covers common tasks—installation, design customization, plug-ins, content editing and management, and so on—in detail, for specific CMS types. The book even covers specialized CMSs, hosting, working with developers, and getting help from the CMS community.

This book helps you understand your requirements first. It walks you through a simple yet effective method of listing down what you want your web site to do. You are then introduced to different types of CMSs such as blogs, forums, general purpose CMS, e-commerce tools, collaboration, and more. This helps you narrow down your search.

This is followed by practical guides on doing some common tasks with any CMS. These tasks include installation, setting up a design, creating navigation structure, entering and editing content, adding pictures, enhancing functionality with extensions and plug-ins, and publishing the site. Here you learn skills that can be applied to any CMS you choose.

It then covers different types of CMSs in detail. The book is full of how-tos for popular CMSs, and listings of other choices that you have. No matter what your need is, you will certainly develop useful skills with this book.

At the end, the book covers important subtopics that usually go uncovered: how to select a web host for your site; how to select and work with a software developer/vendor for customizations; how to get help from community resources and winners of Packt's CMS awards.

Overall, this book helps you throughout the process of building and launching your CMS-powered web site.

Approach

The book takes a task-centered approach. Each task is taken through steps with detailed instructions. The book is complete with screenshots and resources. It even has supplementary tasks that readers can carry out to further build their skills in each task. Everything is oriented towards day-to-day tasks of managing content with a CMS.

We will be working with Oprah on her Yoga Site. In the process we will learn what we need to do for our own sites.