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

Content or commerce?


Why do we need to talk about CMS and e-commerce? There are hundreds of open source shopping cart systems. If you want to build an e-commerce site, you could easily pick a shopping cart system and get going. After all, the content on an e-commerce site is limited to terms and policies, right?

Well, not really! Today's customers don't buy a product just looking at the product specifications and price. They also want reviews. They want ratings. They probably want a community around the product. You may even need to build web-based support material for the product—especially if your product too is web-based.

Moreover, products have grown complex. They have different colors and variations. To increase sales, you need to up-sell and cross-sell by showing related products. You also need to show multiple images of a product so that users get a better feel of it. You may need to allow customers to compare products side by side and offer discounts.

Once you have a sale, you need...