Content Management Systems
One of the most innovative benefits of the dynamic web programming is the content management system, which makes the life of the Internet content editors easy and their work visually attractive. Imagine you are the editor of an online newspaper or a magazine. Alternatively, you need to create a dictionary website. You are creative in your writings and very knowledgeable about the content you write about. However, these skills alone are not good enough to be able to work in an online news source. You have to have at least the very basic knowledge on the functions and the tags of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). You have to be able to create codes for the presentations of your articles. I know that this process of writing web articles can be really frustrating and exhausting if you have never heard about CMSs (Content Management Systems). Content Management Systems are almost like your personal automated web page authors. You write your articles, puts polls, surveys, rating systems as if you are using a word processor or a visual editing program. Driven by the data you put in, the CMS stores all of these in a database and then translates them into HTML. CMS basically acts like a translator between you and the browsers by creating very user friendly graphical interfaces. CMS generally have a front-end and a back end. The front-end obviously refers to the face of the site that each visitor sees. However, back end is the user-friendly graphical interface where you can edit your content or the template with the help of the many wizards that are supplied by these systems. Lets say you needed to write a code for a user-upload function in the site, or a survey system that would enable the users to vote on your articles; you dont need even to touch Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or any kind of HTML editor; there are already hundreds of modules that are written for different CMSs. You just go and download the module to your server and install it. There are loads of CM systems online that are presented as freeware. However, below are two suggestions for different user groups; Typo3: If you think yourself a professional and think that you can deal with some PHP coding, this robust and very flexible system is just for you. Mambo: If you say No, thanks. I dont want to deal with PHP coding, I am doing this as a hobby, then Mambo should be your choice since it does not let the user to change much and is already supported by many ready-to-install modules and templates. In summary, CMS makes our life much more easier then before and our sites much more attractive. They are the operating systems, personal coders and free translators of the web sites.