Compass Designs

So what exactly is a content management system anyway? To better understand this, let's briefly take a look at your common, garden everyday web page. We will have to talk a little about some of the technology of web pages, but it's worth it to understand the power of a CMS.

Content Management Systems and Joomla

A web page is a set of instructions, HTML (or XHTML) that tell the browser you are using how to present the content of the page. So for example, the code might say "take this title 'My Web Page', make it big and make it red".

This way of creating a web page is pretty outdated, yet it's astonishing how many web designers are creating sites like this. It has two main drawbacks:

• All of the content (My Web Page) and the presentation (big and red) are tied together. If you want to change the color of all your titles, you have to go through all 425 of them and do so.
• The pages are large in file size. Because each bit of content is individually styled, the pages are big, which means slow. Most experts agree that this also penalizes you search engine optimization efforts.

The next step towards understanding content management is a recent (last 4-5 years) development of web standards, a common set of rules for all web browsers how to show a web page. One of these standards is the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control the look and layout of your web page, CSS is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to web documents. All of this presentation information is contained in separate files to the content.

 

Now the file that contains all the content is a lot smaller, it contains only the content and no presentation. All of the styling has been placed in a separate file that is read by the browser and layered over the content to produce the final result.

• Maintaining and revising the page is much easier. If you need to change all the title colors, you just need to change one line in the CSS file.
• Both files are much smaller. The CSS file has the additional advantage that it will be cached (saved) on the viewers local computer so won’t need to be downloaded from the web each time they visit a page.

Note

An example of this can be seen at www.csszengarden.com. This classic CSS site is actually identical content with different CSS applied to it. You can browse through the designs and see the same content styled in hundreds of different ways

The Least You Need to Know

Modern websites separate content from presentation using a technology known as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Now for the content management system.

A CMS does for content what CSS does for presentation.

Read that again carefully. Where CSS separated presentation out from content, a CMS separates the content from the page. That might seem like that leaves nothing, but in reality what is left can be thought of as “placeholders”. This can be represented like the figure below.

 

The "put some content here" is an instruction to the CMS to take some content from a database, the "pure content", and place it in a designated place on the page.

Now, that seems like it is not such a useful trick, but in fact it’s very powerful.

It separates out the responsibilities of developing a web site. The web designer can concern themselves with the presentation/design and the placeholders. This means that non-technical people can be responsible for the content, the words and pictures of a web site. Most CMS’s have built in tools to manage the publication of the content.

The pages are now dynamic. They don't really exist until you follow a link to view them. This means that they can be updated/customized based on the viewer. For example if you place an item in a shopping cart, that item now shows up on the shopping cart page. It got stored in a database and now gets put into the “shopping cart placeholder”. Many complex web applications are in fact mini CMS’s (by this definition) like forums, shopping carts, guest books to name a few. You may have used a Blog before. Based on how we have described it, these are a good example of a CMS, they have a “template” that presents all the content, "the posts" and they are very easy to edit and publish.

The Least you Need to Know

A CMS totally separates the content from any other part of the web pages. This makes changing the page really easy.

The CMS’s available range hugely from enterprise scale versions costing $300,000 to free open sources ones such as Joomla. The modern CMS is usually defined by its abilities to manage and publish content. They have work flow processes that start at content creation and move to publishing. Most do far more, they have the ability to add on a wide range of extensions or add-ons to add functionality of the site. From forums to newsletters, Joomla has over 500 available to it most of which are available for free, created by volunteer developers around the world. The official repository is at extensions.joomla.org and has a rating and review system (which is itself an extension!).

Note

The Joomla Extensions site has a rating and review system. It’s worth being careful with how to use the ratings. The highest rated extensions are shown at the top level of the site. This means that they get more traffic and then tend to get rated more. There are often great extensions that are hidden away in the categories. It’s worth taking an hour or two to browse all of them to find ones that might be of use to you.

There is one large drawback to using a CMS. They can be extremely complex, containing thousands of files and scripts that work together in concert with databases to present a web site. Normally this means that a CMS site will be designed and created by technical staff and managed and run by non-technical users. Joomla probably has one the lowest technological threshold to actually build a CMS site among currently available CMS’s. That’s specifically the purpose of this guide, to guide a non-technical user step by step in learning how to create and manage a web site powered by Joomla.

Static Web Site	Content Management System
Easy to create initial web pages	To create initial pages is time consuming as several inter-related components that work together to create a page
Content is static, changing it requires technical expertise	Content is dynamic, can be changed with no technology knowledge
Difficult to add new functions, often need custom code	Most CMS’s have many extensions that “plug in” easily

 

Useful Links:

www.alistapart.com/articles/cms1

www.cmswatch.com