Hundreds of Web pages on your site mean hundreds of pages of content that you have to deal with. That’s a massive undertaking for even the most industrious of Web site owners. Fortunately, tools are available — known as content management systems — to help you manage your content without driving yourself completely into a coma, and some of them won’t even make you crazy
A content management system is a piece of software that’s used for organizing and facilitating what’s referred to as the collaborative creation of documents and other content. In other words, content management systems help you to create and manage the content on your Web site. For example, if you have a set of articles that you want to first feature on your Web site and then have moved to an archival section when a new article is featured, a content management system helps you do that without having to build a new Web page every time you change the feature articles.
The problem with content management systems is that if you get a proprietary system — a system built specifically to meet your content management needs — you’ll pay upward of $100,000. If you fork over that amount of dough, you can rotate articles from features to archives to your heart’s content and even set it up so that several people can seamlessly contribute to blogs on your site. This might all sound dandy, but just keep in mine that if you’re having the system designed specifically for you, you’ll shell out some serious coin to have it done.
You don’t have to use a proprietary system, though. Several open source software applications for content management exist. Open source software is software that’s created by an individual or company and then shared freely with others. Others can use the software and even change it to specifically meet their needs, without having any expenses to worry about.
The only real drawback to open source content management systems is that nyou either have to be very knowledgeable in certain types of programming or you have to hire someone who is knowledgeable to take care of it for you. True, you could pick up some good books on the topic, but if you’re not a code jockey, you’ll find that the books probably leave you a little lost. Still, if you think you can handle the challenge, Drupal is a good open source content management system, and believe it or not, so is the blogger’s friend, WordPress. Okay, I know WordPress is usually thought of as being a blogging system, but it can also be used as a content management system. If you’re intrigued,