Campaign Kickstart

A new trend in website tools is the “blog engine,” and its cousin the CMS, or Content Management System. Since it’s easier to post to a blog than it is to write a webpage yourself, these are prebuilt websites that let you add new articles and sections.

You probably already know the guts of most webpages today just contain information about the look and layout of a page, plus directions on where to find the content in the database. All the words that you’re reading – THESE WORDS – were pulled out of the database when the CMS parsed the webpage and rendered what displays in your browser.

Perhaps the most compelling feature of the CMS is that it is built around the idea of multiple users, each with their own login. Letting anyone work on the website at any time churns out a lot of productivity from your staff and volunteers.

However, the CMS built website may come at a cost: Your pages may end up looking like a blog if you don’t spend the time to customize it; I stripped the blog fat from this site and customized the sidebar with an index in about 15 minutes using b2evolution Drupal Mephisto.

You may also grow frustrated with the blog software’s limitations and peculiarities. For instance Movable Type has an annoying habit of renaming urls when you open a 2nd edit or change an article’s Title.

Some hosting companies offer a pre-insalled CMS which is extra convenient, but limits your options and makes it hard to clean the slate.

Movable Type – commercial – $$$$
pMachine – $99
Word Press- The most popular CMS
Drupal – One of the easiest to work with
Mambo Server
Joomla! – An offshoot of Mambo, many components are interchangeable
b2evolution – Designed for multiple blogs
Scoop – Requires Unix root to install
Nucleus
Geeklog
PHP-Nuke
phpwcms
phpWebSite
Post-Nuke
Siteframe
Typo3
Xoops

Ruby on Rails CMS

Blog Services
Soapblox

• When I was customizing this site, the first couple of CMS I tried made it easy for me to turn off comments, etc., with a checkbox in the admin pages. There were a lot of admin options. With this site you’re reading currently, I had to edit the design templates to do the same thing, which took a whole 5 minutes with just some understanding of html & Ruby. However the convenience I lost in the first task was gained when I was able to customize the sidebar with an index and easy-to-read link urls. Most old-school CMS would have a plugin for “node words” or something similar, or if not it could be a daunting excursion in plugin building for that brand of blog.

I like Mephisto because it keeps article version history and is so uncluttered there isn’t a single option I didn’t understand at first glance.