Truly Managing Your Own Website
What's a content management system? The term means different things to different people. We define it to be simply a web site that helps you manage content.
When you go to a typical web designer to get a web site, you get something that works like a brochure: snazzy, branded to fit your business, and static. Very expensive to change--you need to go back to the designer to make the slightest change.
Basic web sites work in a similar way. Most web designers use tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, or Microsoft FrontPage to manage your entire site. To change anything, you need to get your designer to open up your site and do the editing. You may be able to purchase tools that allow you to make these changes, too, but then you need to install them and learn to use them.
There is a better way. A content management system allows you to make changes to your own site, without going back to your web designer. You type in your username and password, and click a link to edit virtually any page in the site. Special links allow you to add new pages, or manage other parts of your site.
At Freelock Computing, content management systems are among our most popular products. We convert static web sites into content management systems, often making them look identical to the way they looked before. We can implement a new design from your designer, create a custom template, install add-ons, provide training, hosting, software administration, and support. If you need a custom add-on to one of these systems, we can develop it, and we regularly integrate these systems into other parts of your business system, such as capturing a lead for your sales team to follow up.
Read on for our favorites, and not-so-favorites.
What's a content management system? The term means different things to different people. We define it to be simply a web site that helps you manage content.
When you go to a typical web designer to get a web site, you get something that works like a brochure: snazzy, branded to fit your business, and static. Very expensive to change--you need to go back to the designer to make the slightest change.
Basic web sites work in a similar way. Most web designers use tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, or Microsoft FrontPage to manage your entire site. To change anything, you need to get your designer to open up your site and do the editing. You may be able to purchase tools that allow you to make these changes, too, but then you need to install them and learn to use them.
There is a better way. A content management system allows you to make changes to your own site, without going back to your web designer. You type in your username and password, and click a link to edit virtually any page in the site. Special links allow you to add new pages, or manage other parts of your site.
At Freelock Computing, content management systems are among our most popular products. We convert static web sites into content management systems, often making them look identical to the way they looked before. We can implement a new design from your designer, create a custom template, install add-ons, provide training, hosting, software administration, and support. If you need a custom add-on to one of these systems, we can develop it, and we regularly integrate these systems into other parts of your business system, such as capturing a lead for your sales team to follow up.
Read on for our favorites, and not-so-favorites.
Our Key Content Management Systems
These are the key open source content management systems we use, host, administer, customize and provide training for. We offer lower hosting prices for Gallery and Serendipity because of their central administration.
If you're interested in more details, contact us for a quote or more information!
Drupal
Drupal is quite a bit more powerful than Joomla, but requires more setup to get going. If your needs are more sophisticated than managing stories or forums, Drupal may be the right choice. It's a very powerful system from a developer point of view, and has a huge community following, similar to Joomla. If you're looking for a more flexible user security model, this is the place to start.
Joomla
Great for business sites - users can create pages and add them to the menu. Very nice wysiwyg editor for pages, can handle image uploading and resizing, PDFs/Word Docs, linking to other pages in the site, and tons of add-ons. A bit of technical overhead involved in administering and managing it. Joomla powers the main Freelock web site.
MediaWiki
A wiki engine. This is great if you need to capture knowledge in one place. We use it internally to manage deployment and configuration details about all of our clients. It also powers our public knowledge base, where we collect technical tips and workarounds for various problems we've encountered with specific programs. If you want to enlist help from your customers to write their documentation, wikis can make it possible. Otherwise wikis tend to be great for use as an internal tool.
Gallery2
A powerful photo gallery system.
Word Press
A very popular blog engine. Also quite powerful, and lots of plug-ins available. It's a bit more difficult for non-technical people to learn, use, and maintain--we tend to save it for more advanced users. Word Press powers our blog, Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems. For most users I would tend to recommend Serendipity again. Also, it's harder to administer. But it does have a great spam blocking system.
Other leading PHP-based CMS systems
We include these systems here mainly because we have spent some time evaluating them and their features, but do not have direct daily experience using them--or because we think there are better options. Even so, your needs may make one of these a better fit than what we can offer. We would be happy to help you with these systems, but cannot offer a package deal as compelling as we can for our supported systems.
Serendipity
A powerful blog package that can be embedded in a normal web site. Great for a news page on an otherwise static site, or for just a blog. Better than Word Press for non-technical users. Lots of add-ons.
Typo3
Typo3 is more of an enterprise content management system, one that adds features like a full history of page revisions, full ability to control who has access to which parts of the site, and the ability to enforce a specific publication workflow (author, editor, copyeditor, proofreader, etc).
Postnuke
We tried to like Postnuke. We really wanted to. But after training a handful of non-technical users, we found it to be very confusing to most new users. And then when we dug under the hood and tried to do a custom module, we found the underlying model not very satisfactory. It's powerful, but confusing and sort of strung together with no object-oriented design, and a huge number of custom functions you need to learn to be able to do much with. Mind you, there are plenty of problems from a coding point of view with most of the other CMSs in this list, but Postnuke just doesn't seem to have that active a developer community compared to the others. Postnuke was a leading spin-off of one of the first PHP-based CMS systems, called PHPNuke. Postnuke has a focus on better security, and isn't bad as a community based site, but today I would steer people towards Joomla or Drupal.
Xoops
If you really want a PHPNuke spinoff (don't know why you would), you should check out Xoops. We really know next to nothing about Xoops, other than that it seems to be the current PHPNuke spinoff with a reasonable community behind it. Not enough to make us want to consider it...