So what is a content management system and why is CMS web hosting important?

A content management system is very simply exactly what it states – a system that assists webmasters in maintaining and editing their content on a day-to-day basis. In the web hosting realm, using a CMS to manage your dedicated server is what many webmasters do to minimize effort and outsourcing technical support. Content management systems are designed to be as user-friendly and effortless as possible, as they are designed with the new and inexperienced webmaster in mind. So you can be sure that when you are using a content management system with dedicated web hosting that you will be able to fully maintain your website and implement new changes, add text and photos, blog and links with ease.

Some of the most popular content management systems for web hosting are Joomla, Mambo, WordPress, b2evolution, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Moveable Type, and Typo. Joomla web hosting has become extremely popular recently due to the many free Joomla extensions available, and WordPress Web Hosting is arguably the easiest CMS web hosting platform available for novice webmasters.

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Create standard output templates (usually HTML and XML) that can be automatically applied to new and existing content, allowing the appearance of all content to be changed from one central place.

Easily editable content

Once content is separated from the visual presentation of a site, it usually becomes much easier and quicker to edit and manipulate. Most WCMS software includes WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technical individuals to create and edit content.

Scalable feature sets

Most WCMS software includes plug-ins or modules that can be easily installed to extend an existing site’s functionality.

Web standards upgrades

Active WCMS software usually receives regular updates that include new feature sets and keep the system up to current web standards.

Workflow management

Workflow is the process of creating cycles of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in the CMS. For example, a content creator can submit a story, but it is not published until the copy editor cleans it up and the editor-in-chief approves it.

Delegation

Some CMS software allows for various user groups to have limited privileges over specific content on the website, spreading out the responsibility of content management.^[7]

Document management

CMS software may provide a means of managing the life cycle of a document from initial creation time, through revisions, publication, archive, and document destruction.

Content virtualization

CMS software may provide a means of allowing each user to work within a virtual copy of the entire Web site, document set, and/or code base. This enables changes to multiple interdependent resources to be viewed and/or executed in-context prior to submission.

Content syndication

CMS software often assists in content distribution by generating RSS and Atom data feeds to other systems. They may also e-mail users when updates are available as part of the workflow process

Some company websites use this type of system to help organize their website. For instance, a company has their main website, and then has subpages under this umbrella. What it does it gives the specific departments a free range of adding information, while maintaining a similar look across the entire website.

It makes it easier in the long run for designing websites. If the website has a small error or something that needs to be changed, you don’t have to go back to the web designer because you can do it yourself

For the most part, every content management system is designed to produce the same results. What mainly sets them apart is ease of use and features. One product might lack some of the basic features but make up for them with add-on support. A system that doesn’t have a WYSIWYG editor, for example, may offer support for an add-on module such as TinyMCE. A product that has a complex interface could be enhanced by modifying the menu system or customizing layout templates. When it comes to the open-source CMS, it isn’t so much about native features as it is flexibility. You can access the overall flexibility of a system by viewing it from these angles:

Default Capabilities: The default capabilities of a CMS basically entail what is included with the installation, and determine if you can perform essential tasks without any problems. When assessing the flexibility of any system, it is important to look for one that offers an acceptable level of basic functionality and provides the structure for creating a dynamic website.

Add-on Support: Most systems support add-on modules so it is up to you to find out what capabilities they possess. Aside from features, consider how easy they will be to incorporate into the existing system as well.

Templates: Templates are a major part of any CMS as they allow you to modify the look and feel of your content. If you are proficient with coding, you may want to find a product that lets you write your own templates. In this case, you would need a system that supports the languages you are familiar with.

SEO: Many content management systems offer search engine appeal right out of the box. However, not every product does. Visibility is crucial for a large site so it is best to find a product that enables the easy creation of web pages and appeases the search engines.

Product Recommendations

The open-source CMS market is huge and there are a variety of products available. Two of the most widely used systems on the market are Drupal and Mambo. Drupal is a robust system with quality design and clean code. It comes loaded with exceptional default capabilities as well as templates and layouts that are easily to manipulate. Drupal is one of the most comprehensive systems available and the preferred choice for many businesses.

Mambo is easy to install and enables the simple management of content-rich sites. The system includes a number of default features that provide support for multiple authors with little training required. Both systems are SEO-friendly and support various add-ons for enhanced functionality. Keep in mind that each product requires that you have a basic understanding of HTML and PHP.

1. What’s Your Goal?

No two systems are the same. Some are suited for personal sites, some for publishers while others are specifically designed for corporate solutions. Before deciding on a particular product, it is best to decide what you plan do with it. Are you looking for enhanced blog functionality or looking to create a huge news publishing site? Are you trying to build a corporate intranet or create a social network? There is a vast selection out there and most systems are geared towards a particular purpose.

2. What Functionality do You Require?

Most CMS software has the ability to be greatly enhanced while others only support limited plugins. You need to determine the level of functionality you require out of the box as well as flexibility that grants more power in the future. CMS features range widely but here some of the basics you will find in the more popular products.

Forums – While forums are a common feature, not every CMS supports them. The good thing is that forums can be incorporated in a number of ways. For example, they can be custom built into a CMS or implemented via plugin. If your project requires forums, be sure to do some research and find out how many come included or what method is required to incorporate them.

Polls – Polls are another hot CMS feature. If you want to allow your users to vote on specific content, you will need a product that supports this feature.

WYSIWYG Editor - Short for What You See Is What You Get, the WYSIWYG editor can make your life as an administrator much easier. This tool offers a simple word processor interface that gives you the ability to easily add text and pictures. If you’re not proficient with programming languages, the WYSIWYG editor is one feature you can’t do without.

3. Compatibility

When deciding on a CMS, you need to keep your web host in mind and find out if they actually support the software. For instance, there are some systems that are entirely based on PHP while others cater to Ruby on Rails and other languages. Aside from the language, you need to know what database your host supports. Some products are designed for MySQL, others are designed for MS SQL. Versions are important as well as a CMS based on PHP 5 may not integrate well on a server equipped with PHP 4.

4. Customization

Depending on your goals, you may want a CMS that is easy to customize. Rest assured because themes are widely available for most systems. Drupal, Joomla and Mambo are just three of many products supported by a wide range of additional themes.

5. Support

Whether its open-source or commercial, finding a CMS that offers support is vital. If you purchase a product, be sure that you can get technical support from the vendor. If you opt for an open-source product, be sure to select one with an active user community

Mambo

While there has only been a slight change in the project name, most of Mambo’s development team abandoned the system in 2005 to create Joomla. Every since then, the system has struggled in terms of popularity as a large portion of the Mambo user community followed the developers in favor of Joomla. Be that as it may, Mambo remains a solid choice and continues to improve.

Advantages - Mambo is a stable, lightweight system that puts out exceptional performance on a busy website. Despite losing the original development team, the project has good management and positive hope for future development. Even as an open-source system, Mambo can be easily integrated with non-GPL systems and commercial extensions.

Disadvantages - The biggest drawback to Mambo is that it lacks new extensions. This goes back to 2005 as most of the developers who wrote extensions for the system shifted over to Joomla. Another disadvantage is that Mambo has a smaller user community than Joomla, meaning you might have to search long and hard to get quality support.

Mambo works best for small to medium sized businesses as well as webmasters that do not require lots of upgrades and extensions. To put it simple, this system performs better on a basic website that contains minimal interactive features.

Joomla

As we mentioned above, Joomla 1.0 is very similar to Mambo. In fact, there are a number of extensions that support both systems. Although the first generation still has a large user base, that will all change soon as the Joomla development team is slated to halt support for the product this coming July. Joomla 1.5 offers many improvements over the previous version and is largely supported by the development team and user community.

Advantages – Joomla 1.5 is supported by a wide variety of extensions and the number is growing faster than any CMS that forked off from Mambo. The system also supports many of the older extensions with the aid of the legacy mode plugin. The rapidly expanding community ensures that you can get decent support and answers in Joomla forums.

Disadvantages – Joomla 1.5 is a bit heavier than the previous version and thus might run slower depending on the server. This could make it real frustrating to keep your site fresh with the necessary updates. Additionally, the Joomla team has taken an official stance where the GPL states that commercial extensions are not to interact with the system’s API, basically ruling out any developers who do not want their extensions licensed under the GPL. On the other hand, many developers have chosen to ignore this rule. As it stands now, it seems as if this is one rule that will never be strictly enforced.

Joomla is best suited for small to medium sized businesses with the need to create a content-rich site and access a variety of third-party extensions.

If you’re looking for a winner, Joomla is most likely to be supported into the future but Mambo will probably require fewer upgrades as versions aren’t released as frequently.

1. Search Engine Friendly – Drupal offers enhanced control over URL structure, making this CMS search engine friendly right out of the box. Each piece of content can become customized with clean URLs that better your chances of ranking well in the search engines.

2. Custom Content - The CCK (Content Construction Kit) in Drupal allows you to easily create various types of content. Common examples include news stories, blog posts and tutorials. With the Views Modules feature, you can display these content types in numerous ways. While the average CMS requires complex coding to enable these tasks, Drupal makes it all simple as no programming experience is required.

3. Revision Control – Drupal allows you to save new versions of your web pages every time they are edited. This gives you the ability to revert back to your old versions at any time.

4. Advanced Categorization – Drupal’s taxonomy system lets you organize and tag content with ease. Known as vocabularies, each set of categories can be organized as certain types of content. For instance, you could have blog content that permits free tagging while other sections can be limited to different list of categories. When combined with the CCK and View Modules feature, this functionality makes it easy to target keywords you want to implement into your site.

5. User Management - The Drupal CMS was designed to support community-based sites, proven by the enhanced user and access control functionality it offers. There are no limits to the user roles and access levels you can create and customize. The best thing about Drupal is that it lets you keep advanced management features disabled and then enable them when your site grows and requires more community features.

6. PHP-based – By default, Drupal uses a PHP template theme engine, allowing you to instantly enhance the presentation of your site. Applying themes in Drupal is easier than the WordPress environment and as long as the they are completely scripted, you don’t have to know anything about PHP to install them.

7. Excellent Community Support – Of all open-source content management systems, Drupal has one of the largest and most active communities. You will understand how well supported the CMS is when taking a look at the long scroll of modules that have been contributed to the project. There are many ways to get support including Drupal forums along with a number of video tutorials, podcasts and online documentation. Drupal’s popularity gives you the assurance that this CMS will be around for a long time.

Joomla is highly functional yet lacks out of the box search engine friendliness. WordPress is easy to use but can’t handle larger websites. Where these systems and other platforms fail, Drupal picks up the slack with instant functionality able to satisfy a wide range of needs.

What is Post Nuke?

Post Nuke began as a fork of the original PHP Nuke CMS. The project was initiated because many of its users believed the development environment should be more open and demographic. Users realized that the only way to achieve this was to create their own CMS. Post Nuke has grown and stands on its own merits apart from PHP Nuke. Fully modular and capable of running on both Apache and IIS web servers, this CMS offers a wide range of benefits to anyone who interacts with the software.

Benefits of Post Nuke

Cost-effective – Released under the GPL license, Post Nuke is an open-source application that can be used, modified and distributed for free. The software can be downloaded from online and easily incorporated into your hosting environment.

Easy to Use – Post Nuke is the ultimate CMS, providing a way to easily create and maintain a large community website. Users can post comments, share messages internally, publish news articles, search the site by word or phrase and much more.

Access Control – The Post Nuke CMS offers a Permissions Control feature that lets certain users access specific areas based on settings made by the website administrator. This same feature also provides the ability to create a subscriber-based site where users are given additional administrative privileges.

Flexibility – With Post Nuke, administrators can control the look and feel of a website through the software’s comprehensive, flexible theme system. Those with a basic knowledge of HTML can instantly enhance the presentation of their site without needing to code with PHP.

Fast and Efficient – Post Nuke comes with a built-in catching system that results in a high-performance website that offers excellent value to the end-user.

W3C Compliant - The Post Nuke system is well designed and in accordance with W3C guidelines. This allows visitors to get the most out of a Post Nuke website from their browser.

Efficient Banner System – An integrated banner module makes it easy for affiliates to keep up with click counts and activity for their banner ads placed on a Post Nuke website.

Quality Support – One of the greatest attributes of Post Nuke is that the software is supported by a large community of developers and users across the world. These people make sure that bugs and problems are addressed and fixed quickly. You will find many Post Nuke forums around the web where active users offer tips to help out the user community.

Development for Post Nuke ceased in 2007 but it still remains one of the most widely used content management systems on the open-source market. The software is robust, feature-rich and easier to use than most other systems. The only downside is that with the halt in development, finding a web host that supports Post Nuke may be harder than before.

When comes to this type of software, the variety is tremendous. And while there are many to choose from, one of the most comprehensive of them all is an application known as Geeklog.

What is Geeklog?

More commonly referred to as a weblog publishing system, Geeklog is an fully functional content management system used to build and manage websites. Per the GNU General Public License, it can be used, modified and distributed freely. Though it has the ability to create traditional websites, Geeklog is most often used to build content-rich blog and online communities. This software has exceptional functionality right out the box, but can be dramatically enhanced when incorporating the wide range of add-on modules it supports. The power of Geeklog gives it more capabilities than most blog engines while the simplicity offers a user-friendliness the average CMS lacks.

The Geeklog Advantage

The blog is all about interaction, a medium that allows you to connect with your audience and lets them communicate amongst each other as well. With Geeklog, you can create a way for your audience to interact and also grant administrative privileges to multiple authors. This is made possible by the ability to set permission levels for individual users, enabling you to determine just who is able to enjoy functions such as uploading files, publishing articles, editing content and adding more users to the site.

Geeklog is integrated with several interactive features to power your online community. Some of the most notable include comment threads, mailing lists and shared image galleries. The built-in calender gives administrators and users the ability to post information about upcoming events while the reader polls allow you to get a feel for what your audience is thinking. There is also support for RSS feeds to keep readers abreast on the latest news along with the ability to integrate RSS headlines from other websites into your own page. This array of features allows you to establish a close-knit community as small or big as you like. Best of all, Geeklog delivers functionality where you thriving website virtually runs itself.

Geeklog Extensions

The default features of Geeklog are great but this CMS gets even better when extending its capabilities. Though naturally search engine friendly, Geeklog add-ons help you create more appealing URLs, easily incorporate advertising campaigns, social bookmarking tools and simplify the process of maintaining your content. These add-ons are easy to install and require little to no programming skills.

If you want to create a dynamic blog or content-rich site, the Geeklog system makes a fine choice. All you need is a web hosting provider who supports the software that has PHP and MySQL installed on their server. In most cases, the software can be installed directly through your control panel in a few easy clicks.

What is Xoops?

Short for eXtensible Object Orientated Portal System, Xoops is an open-source content management system that is free to use, modify and redistribute. Power and ease of use makes it an ideal tool for creating data-driven community sites of all sizes. Many developers use Xoops to create blogs, corporate intranet sites and content-rich information portals. The major draw of this software is that it enables fast, simple management for whatever task is required. The Xoops CMS is largely supported on the web hosting market. All you need is a provider equipped with the Apache web server, PHP and an SQL database, preferably MySQL. .

Xoops Features

Xoops is integrated with a number of features to simplify content management and enhance functionality. Some of the most common features include:

Advance Access Control – As an administrator, Xoops give you the ability to grant access rights to certain groups of users. You can allow them to access specific content and features such as publishing their own content and uploading files.

Module Administration – Like many open-source content management systems, Xoops can be greatly enhanced through a wide variety of add-on modules. These add-ons can be installed, uninstalled, enabled and disabled directly from the intuitive module administrative system.

Xoops modules offer the following capabilities:

Personalization – Xoops gives you the ability to set permissions for specific users, providing you with control of all the individual elements they are able to access on your website.

User Management – Through user management, you can search for your users by a multitude of criteria, allow them to send email and private messages to other users via a template-based messaging system.

International language support – Xoops is supported by a large group of developers and users. The project has numerous support sites all over the web for users who speak various languages. The software itself offers support for multiple languages. Some include Chinese, Korean and Japanese to name a few.

Customizable interface – Xoops uses a theme-based template systems that allows you to instantly enhance the presentation of your site. What is so unique about this CMS is that it lets both you and your users change the look of web pages by choosing from a wide range of available themes.

Optimization – Xoops supports many add-ons to help make your site more search engine-friendly. These modules better the chances of your meta tags, title tags and URLs being recognized and indexed by the search engine spiders.

Xoops has won several awards for its power, straightforwardness and support for multiple languages. This CMS is easy to find and incorporate as it can typically be installed directly from your control panel software.