Vyoma

Ah Danesh! That is really helpful. Oh boy. You really know how to find your way around the internet space. OK. I do not have access to certain things here. But I think I can get it done by end of this week, and let you all know how things went.

I was going through some of the photos I had taken some time back when I was on my vacation. The following two are amoung the lot I had taken:

 

 

Synopsis

This is an article to understand the basics of Content Management System (CMS). It would briefly look into the origins and advent of CMS. It would also look into few of the variations and the technology involved in the design of CMS. This article would be focusing on the CMS from the perspective as a website, but it must be noted that similar technology and design principles go into a CMS for a in-house or intranet based CMS for any organization.

 

Introduction

Content Management System (CMS) is just that - what the words mean. If an attempt has to be made to define or describe it, it can be made by saying that it is a system to gather, store, organize, present and make changes to information or content. The Internet is filled with information and content, and in the early days, they were just put there with out much thought on how one could reach it when there would be just too many of them. This did give market to many Search Engine based companies, but every webmasters’ aim was to present the content on his or her website in a logical and convenient manner. This called for the role of CMS. It came to be used not just by the webmasters of the websites hosted on the internet, but also the information managers of organizations that generated a lot of data that had to be retrieved and presented to its employees.

 

Content Management System from a web based perspectives needs to provide certain basic features that would promote it to such a system. A very basic CMS would require a facility to put content into it. Content can be anything that the CMS is designed to handle. It could be plain text documents or images. It could be music or video or even binary data that would be used by some other systems. The CMS should be able to take the content and store it at a designated place. Also, the CMS should let a user retrieve the content which was put into the system earlier. The CMS would be of no use if it was not able to retrieve the content. Another basic necessity would be to control who puts the content into the CMS and who gets it out of the system. These basic features are required by any CMS.

 

A Content Management System is able to control the content based on the roles or designation of the user. Most of the time it is also required to do changes to the content - this too is governed by the role of the user. There are other features that it may provide and it will be looked into a little later.

 

Background

There are different types of content that needed to be published on the internet. The requirement was there and still exists. Whatever may be the type of content – be it text, images, music, video or any combination of those – many choices are presented by the technology present today.

 

In early days, the webmaster or the designers and developers of the website were did not have the luxury of having technology that facilitated Content Management System. They had to put all the content in hand coded HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) pages. All these pages once put up on the internet became static pages. These pages had content that never changed on its own. If anything had to be changed in any particular page, the webmaster had to do those changes on the corresponding HTML source code of that page, and then upload them to the server.

 

These changes, if small and isolated to one or few pages did not present with any problem, but to do a website wide change – for example, include another menu item – required to insert the HTML code to all the pages. It turned out to be a hassle to do such trivial changes and was a nightmare for webmasters of large websites. Various tools were developed to handle such a case. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Editors were used to generate the HTML page offline and then upload it to the servers.

 

Speaking theoretically a Content Management System could have been designed in terms of process. Content could have been stored offline and people with designated roles could add or edit to those stored content. Periodically, the content could be converted to HTML pages and uploaded to the server overwriting the earlier version. Though such a system could have been possible, and may have been employed, it would not truly have been dynamic websites.

 

But this method of creating content and publishing on the internet is still viable for very small website or single page websites where the content is stand alone and there requires absolutely or very minimal changes to it periodically. Another advantage of flat HTML pages is that they are fast loading websites. They have no computations to be done in the back stage. All the content is in the form that browsers are capable of rendering the content without further alteration.

 

Advent

Before we can look into the advent of Content Management Systems, the email groups and the bulletin boards would demand inspection. The email or the electronic mail grew along with the internet. The email was a medium of exchanging information or content, quite similar to what website did. But websites were targeted on many audience where as email was a one-to-one communication. In that sense, email groups were a step towards a one-to-many communication. Here, a list of email was made up as a group, and whenever one person mailed to the group email address, it was received by all that subscribed to that group.

 

Bulletin boards though, took another step towards a dynamic website. Here, the messages (or the content) that was put up by one person was stored in a server and it could be viewed by all. A public bulletin board, thus served as a website with dynamic content. But the bulletin boards are usually a chaos and it requires considerable amount of patience to keep track of things that one is interested in. The technology to have such a bulletin board as a website on a server is required to be more advanced than a server that has to just serve flat HTML files.

 

The requirement of more controlled way to manage the content called for CMS. The technology that could create a bulletin board was just enough to create Content Management Systems. The email groups and the bulletin boards could be said to have influenced the advent of CMS.

 

Variations

There are several variations of CMS. Most of them are simple systems that allow adding, editing and viewing content based on roles specified. One or few people are given access rights to do the adding and editing of content. This content is presented to everyone in most cases. In some cases, all or part of the website may be restricted to the public and made available only to a group of people.

 

In this point of view, forums can be considered as CMS for several reasons. Most of the forum softwares are bulletin board systems with increased control on the access based on roles.

 

A specialized variation of CMS is a Blog. Blog stands for web log. The blogs are a topic that is worth discussing separately, but from the point of view of a CMS, they are quite definitive in their structure. Blog software allows for content to be added periodically (and also edit them later). The latest few posts – the content of a blog – are presented in the front page. Archive links are generated to provide access for posts made earlier and have gone out of the front page as new posts were made by the author. Some blog softwares also allow for multi-authors to publish in a blog.

 

A full blown CMS though would be capable of doing all that and more. It would allow the webmaster or the site administrator to choose how the content is organized – a way to categorize all the content so that the retrieval and presentation of the information may be done conveniently. It would let them create user groups that would be assigned roles and given specific access rights. It would allow them to move the blocks of navigation and content elements around on the pages so that they can modify the way the website presents the content. It would allow the site administrator to integrate other modules or functions with the website that would be required by the organization that owns the website.

 

Technology

There are various technology that are available that would make the design of CMS possible. The CMS may be coded in CGI scripts, Perl, ASP, JSP or PHP with any database (Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL to name a few). A very common and popular setup of PHP with MySQL or PostgreSQL as the backend database is used for relatively smaller websites.

 

It may be noted here that there are two types of CMS based on a subtle concept on how the content is presented from the point of view of technology. One of them is that when content is added to the CMS, it is parsed and then published as a flat HTML page. Another method is where content stored in database and retrieved in the HTML format when requested for. The two methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. The first method requires lesser database access, and the HTML pages are retrieved much faster than the other method. Moreover they are considered to be more crawlers friendly and the search engines find them easier to index. On the other hand, the editing of content may be a problem. In the other method, it is not a problem and the presentation can be changed, per person basis, as the content is stored in the database. But the second method requires more database access than the first.

 

Options

There are two options for webmasters to choose from when they decide to go for a CMS to manage the content of the website – custom built or pre-designed CMS software. The custom CMS option is a very flexible solution and can be opted for by a large organization that has resources to go on such an endeavor. But when that is not the case, a off the shelf CMS can be opted for. There are many commercial as well as Open Source CMS available. Some of the Open Source CMS are phpNuke, Drupal, Mambo and Joomla.

 

Choosing a off the shelf or the pre-designed option is also good in terms that implementing most of the functionalities of the system required by a website would be reinventing the wheel. Moreover, if opted for a Open Source CMS, one always has the option of customizing it to their needs.

Originally posted at WiseTome.Com - Content Management Systems by Mahesh

 

OK. I have been working quite a bit for my website and have been striving towards getting good content for my site. I have been involved in the ins and outs of CMS these few days, and the above article is what I came up with. The website is hosted in my Xisto account, and to show my gratitude, I would like to make the article available here also.

 

Please do review it - for I know that there are more exprienced people here - and give me the feedback. I would be working on more articles, and when I write more articles related to technology, I would be posting it here at Asta Host forums too.

Incidentally, I have done the same with my blog and my website. I did not know how to create a sitemap for my site - I have just given the RSS Syndication feed of my site to the Google Sitemap. I do not know if it is of any use. Moreover, how do I create a Sitemap for a site like mine. It will be ever growing as I go on adding content to it. I am using Drupal as the CMS. Is there anyway to create Sitemaps automatically for all the nodes? That is automatically create a Sitemap that contains URLs to all the content pages of the site?

Hello there doudou. I think you are in quite the same situation as I was in about a week back. I would say that if you want a site that requires features more than that of a blog - quite considerably more, you would need to go for a Content Management System. And also, I have read it in some article somewhere (I cannot place it exactly from memory) that Drupal cannot be easily compared with other CMS using a matrix analysis due to a different approach it takes to storing content - it is almost object oriented. Every content is a node, and thus almost all operations may be done with each kind of content.Now for the other question that could you shift from Drupal to Wordpress. Well, I have to say that since I have worked with both of them, I do not see any easy way to convert all the content from Drupal to Wordpress.Another thing I would like to say about themes is that, though Drupal does not have many of themes out there, it does have a good community base out there and it would not take long before the themes start to get designed for Drupal. Moreover, it is very easy to customize the theme in Drupal. A good approach would be to choose a basic theme that is close to what you want and then configure it to your needs.

You could check out the site I made out of Drupal. (I have posted it here in the reviews section).

Here is the URL: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

You know what? After you pointed me at that module, I went and had a good look at it and read its documentation. It really deserves to be in the core of Drupal. I hope they put it into the core when they go 4.8 or something like that.OK. seec77, I think we should stop discussing on the other Modules. I started this thread as "Drupal Taxonomy Module".

OK. I have neither been a student of Computer Science, nor a full blown teacher in the Subject. But I have had some parallel experiences on the topic. Firstly, I was a student of Electronics And Communication, and that involved a lot of subjects that Jose mentioned: Digital Systems, Assembly Languages (8086/88 series, and 8051), and Computer Architecture. The other topics, I have studied on my own interest. Now, as for teaching experience, I cannot say it was a full time effort. But I did take classes on 'Programming in C' to a handful of students.This I say, to put whatever I say in the right perspective.Now, here is what has inspired me to study more and also have seen in most of the students that I have taught. It is to make them see the details and the big picture in the same period of one class. One of my students asked how one particular function worked in C language. I explained him the the basics of compiler construction, and the resulting machine code. Leading the chain of his reasoning, I further explained him, how the machine codes triggered the gates in the digital circuits of the Arithmetic and Logic Unit. Then, on explanation of how transistors were used to make those gates, and how the electrons acted in those transistors, he was awed by the details of everything and also how it all summed up to give a C language function that most of us take for granted. It is this inspiration and sense of awe that we need to kindle - once I did that in the student, it was a breeze to teach them the rest of the language. I could teach them all of the course syllabus, and they even ventured to the advanced topics.I know, what I stated above has not been written to tell the principle, but I cannot quite place it. So, I have given what happened as I had been teaching to those students. I think, as a teacher, it becomes our responsibility to create the sense of awe and the hunger for more in the students. Then, we just need to get the horse to the pond - the horse drinks at its own will.

I think we should discuss this on CMS->Drupal so that if we're on to any valuable information, we'll be able to share it with the public. If you have any specific questions just post a thread there (and PM me a link ) and I'll answer. I feel like writing a Drupal Module Guide. I think I'll start working on that. If anyone is interested, PM me or contact me through MSN (check my profile).

I see that you have already replied to the thread I started there at the CMS->Drupal section: http://forums.xisto.com/topic/90437-topic/?findpost=1064349709

And pertaining to the Drupal Module Guide, and the above thread, I have done some study on the Taxonomy Module. I think I can write up a basic guide to understanding of Taxonomy module.

I have one word for you: Views. It's a great module that allows you to create a menu/block/page consisting of a listing of nodes (that follow a specific criteria). If you're having problems with it contact me.

 

seec77, thanks for pointing out that to me. I have one specific question though. Is the View Module a core module of the Drupal CMS? I am a bit paranoid on the continuity of the modules and I am a bit worried on using Modules that are not core to Drupal. What I mean is, when Drupal changes its version and there needs an upgrade, I am afraid that there would be considerable time before the other Modules that are not core, to upgrade and be compatible with the upgraded Drupal.

 

Anyway, thanks for the pointer on that module. I would surely try it out.

Hi all!

I have finally got a domain name and also set up the website that I wanted to launch for a long time.

URL: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

It is still in the inception stage, and does not have many articles yet. (It has exactly one, to be precice). But most of the setup is done.

The articles would be acessible to anyone - even unregistered users.
Only registered users (Members), would be able to comment on an article.
There would be some members who would be Authors, who will be able to submit articles.
Categories are limited for now, but would be expanded as and when the number of articles grows.
For now, only I would be approving and publishing the articles, only after review of those articles.
This long line of process is to maintain the quality of articles.

Since, there is not much content yet, I would like you all to review the site based on layout, and user-friendliness - as of now.

All comments and critiques are welcome.

Hey, thanks for that link, sid.calcutta. It helped me quite a bit. I could easily create a simple vocabulary and a list of terms for my site. I could also make it so that all the articles would be tagged to one of the items.

 

For now, it goes something like this:

Vocabulary: Topic

Terms (will add more later):

-Photography

-World Building

-Wise Tome

-Other

 

For now, I have disabled the multi-select which I may enable later.

 

Now, I have a question. How do I make it come automatically in a menu? At present, I have put a menu in a block and I am hand coding each of the above taxonomical term URL to each of the menu item. How do I make it come automatically, such that, when I add another term, I need not go and make changes in the menu block?

I installed Drupal for my website, and am having a walk in the park for almost all the modules. The one module that I am finding it hard to understand is the Taxonomy module.It is one of the most confusing and hard-to-learn module in the Drupal, but I went through few of their documentation and I realized that it is a powerful tool for categorization. Since I am planning on launching a site that contains quality articles, and these articles need to be categorized, I understood that I need to use this module soon as the artcile-base starts growing. Could some one who has used Drupal, explain to me how I should go about using it? Some guides, pointers or tips please?

I cannot really say much about other CMS because I have not used any other than Drupal. I followed seec77's advice (in some other thread), and went ahead and installed Drupal. My needs were really basic, as I am just starting my site, and I found that Drupal was not at all bloated with all the features. I think, this is one of the major advantage of using Drupal. I comes along many modules - thirty one (in Drupal 4.7.2) to be precise. Out of them, few basic things are required for running the engine:blockfilternodesystemuserwatchdogThere are other 25 modules, and I just enabled only those that I needed (as simple as checking a check-box). Thats it. All the other things just did not appear anywhere else, and everything else was clutter free from what was not required.Even installing a module was real easy. I wanted an ad placing module, and Adsense served my puprose - integrating the module to Drupal, was just placing the module file in the module directory and running one php - I do not think it can get more simple than that.I feel I have a lot to explore in Drupal, but I can say that it is good. (I do not know if it is best). Hey seec77, how do I contact you regarding this? Or should we discuss about it at the CMS->Drupal section of the forum?

Well I tried again and it did not work. Then I realized that I am using the infamous Microsoft IE!I deleted all the cookies and then retried logging in. I works! Man... so everything did go straight forward - it was just the stupid tools I am using. I really need to set my crashed PC fixed and get a net connection. I then, need not rely on these workstations at the net browsing centers. Thanks pyost for checking. I feel so embarased.

Oh boy! Setting up a website even using a CMS does not seem to be straight forward task. I have noticed a problem.

As stated earlier in another thread, I have already registerd for the domain wisetome.com and parked it against kmaheshbhat.astahost.com. Also, for illustrating the problem I am facing, I have created a user with the following details for my site:

Username: joe
Password: joe

(This is a temporary user that I will be deleting later).

Now here is the problem I am facing. Let us take the following two cases:

Case 1:
Go to URL: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/
'>
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Log in as joe (password is joe) in the User Login block.
When you log in the User Block dissapears, and we get another block with joe in bold and on the top and "my account" and "logout" as options.

Well, this is how it should be acting and everthing is fine. Please logout.

Case 2:
Go to URL: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/
'>
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

It shows up the same site (obviously).
Again, log in as joe (password joe) in the User Login block.

It does not log in at all!

As I illustrated above, it does not log in when I use
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/
as the URL as opposed to using kmaheshbhat.astahost.com as the URL to go to the site. Now, if I cannot use wisetome.com as the URL, then what is the point in registering for that domain name?

I do not know how to solve this problem! I do not know if the problem is due to setting up of the domain name or setting up of Drupal, the CMS.

The CMS I have used is Drupal 4.7.2 - the latest stable release.

I have been their user for quite some time, and I am aware of their development of ZetaBoards or InvisionFreeBoards V2 as they were calling it earlier. I have been running a roleplaying forum there and one thing I could note was the ease with which one could configure the site from the administration panel.The development of the new board software has been going on for quite some time, and it is showing strains on the users' patience as they wait for it. But the delay of the release is understandable as the development is almost single handedly done by a person, who goes by the name "Ben", I think.

1. Parked Domains: If you're domain is "user.astahost.com" and you buy "user.com" and add it to your account as a parked domain, you would then be able to access "user.astahost.com" via "user.com" instead. You could also purchase "user.net" and add it as a parked domain and access "user.astahost.com" via "user.net" AND "user.com"
2. Add-on Domains: If your domain is "user.com" and you wanted to add another website to your hosting account, you could add-on a domain. When you add-on a domain, a subdomain path is created. So, like if you wanted to add the website domain "user1.org" to your hosting account of "user.com", just add-on the domain. CPanel will allow you to link the subdomain "user1.user.com" with "user1.org". Anything you place in the public_html/user1 directory will be viewable under "user1.org"

[N]F

Thanks nightfox. I am now clear on how to park domain and add-on domains. It was only the fact that creating a subdomain created a folder in public_html, that I did not know. Got that cleared from this thread.

Anyway, even from the network
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/
was not working, it is working today. So, it seems to have propagated to all the networks - or atleast most of it. Now, I think I can start putting it in the signature of my emails. And that also means I have a lot of work to do - I need to create quality articles on few topics that I am good at.

OK. Thanks to every one.
Moderators may close this thread.

Yes. I am sorry for the alarm. I tried from other network and it was working. I think the names have not propagated to all the networks yet.

 

Thanks pyost.

That I did not know.

Anyway though, I had already moved all content of wisetome to public_html.

Now I have another problem. I had moved the contents and then parked the domain name wisetome.com. It was working yesterday. That is when I typed http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ or http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ it would go to the proper location. That is, it would show, http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/.

But now, I am trying the wisetome.com URL and it is showing a HTTP 500 error! The webiste is still up, because when I give the Xisto URL, it shows the proper website - one where I had used Drupal.

I already checked up my registrar, it is properly showing ns1.astahost.com and ns2.astahost.com as the name servers, and also the domain name is active.

Could someone tell me what I should be doing? Because I have started to panic. It was working yesterday (about 7 or 8 hours back) and now it is not.

I believe that this could be done by using Add-on domain instead of Parked domain. Add-on domain is used to "cover" a certain subdomain on a host. So, you should create a subdomain and call it whatever you want. You would get something like this: wisetome.kmaheshbhat.astahost.com. After that, you should be able to point you domain name to that subdomain as an add-on one.

 

So I will be only able to point it to wisetome.kmaheshbhat.astahost.com and not kmaheshbhat.astahost.com/wisetome?

 

Well, then I think, I should move the installed CMS system to that subdomain, right?

Alternatively, I have to move all files from public_html/wisetome directory to wisetome directory?

Welcome to Xisto.This community here is a group of talented people whose skills range from coding, networking, desing and artwork. We all learn and help each other.You will have a nice time here.

I think I have almost made up my mind now - I would be going for a Content Management System. I am at present trying out Drupal. It seems to be quite robust and flexible.

 

I had installed it in the Xisto account using Fantastico - and it installed Drupal 4.5. I experimented around and liked it. I went over and checked at https://www.drupal.org/ and noticed that the stable version Drupal 4.7.2 was out. So, I removed the installation I had done (not a worry, as I had not yet put any content in it), and then installed it. It was quite a task, and I now know the cPanel pretty well.

 

While installing Drupal 4.7 manually, I faced problems using the MySQL that was already installed for 4.5, so I removed that too. I then created another MySQL database. I was a bit perplexed as to how I should be loading the Drupal database schema. Then, I saw the solution was to use the SQL input in the phpMyAdmin module of cPanel. All I had to do was run the script given in the drupal/database/mysql something script file and run it. The database was created without a problem. I could even go ahead and install few themes. I also installed the Adsense module - have to configure it yet.

 

unimatrix, I notice that you have quite a bit experience in configuring and tailoring CMS for websites. You said that Drupal was good for personal stuff - but I find it not the case as I went through the Drupal.org, and the admin panel of the one installed in my Xisto account. I find it quite scalable. But please do not take offence - it is just a view of a newbie. :(

 

Now, I think I should go ahead and cofigure it properly. Before that, I assume the logical step would be to crystallize the mission and purpose of my website, and also setting the parameters.

 

Configuring it seems quite a tug on the learning curve. I figure that since I am making an article library of sorts, I should understand the workin of Taxonomy module properly - a huge bunch of articles that are not properly categorized would be a waste.

 

Any Drupal users out there who could throw in some pointers?

Fellow AstaHoster!

I got my own domain name: wisetome.com
This is my first considerably large endevour on the web. I have been doing a bit on forums and blogs, but I have kept it low on pulicity. People have just stumbled across them and that is it.

But now, I am thinking of doing it a bit larger. I have been already discussing about this here in Xisto forums with you all. (http://forums.xisto.com/topic/90376-topic/?findpost=1064349267).

Anyway, I registered this domain name, wisetome.com. I went to the company website where it is registered, logged into their control panel, and then put up the name servers as ns1.astahost.com and ns2.astahost.com.

I belive I should be waiting for atleast 24 hours before the name propagates and gets updated on the Domain Name Servers.
After that, I should proceed to park that domain in the Xisto cPanel, right?

And I have another query: I have been trying to setup the website at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/
Now, how do I park it such that, when I type wisetome.com in the browser, it goes directly to http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/?

What is the size of Drupal, by the way? I mean, I have only 150 MB ain my Xisto account and I need to consider that before going for the option of a CMS or a Blog Software.

 

And can I install it through Fantastico in Xisto's CPanel?

 

Edit: Ok. I found it out myself. It takes about 2 MB to install and can be installed from Fantastico.