CMS Guide
Content Management Systems provide a very practical and quick solution for the daunting tasks related to creation, maintenance and management of a web site application. It provides a new and better way to do these tasks which were once considered very technical in nature and not the cup of tea of an average computer user. The philosophy behind CMS and specially Open Source CMSs is to empower these average computer users by giving them an approach to website management that is as easy as typing an article in a Word Processor.
Like every other product in the software world, CMS systems too had been commercialized by vendors to churn profits from this great idea. Some of these are even open source but you pay money for gaining support from the company in using and possibly troubleshooting it at times. But there are also CMS packages available that are both Open Source and Free. These packages include Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki, Wordpress etc. These are mostly community driven projects where everyone is free to participate in the development process.
Open Source CMS systems are usually written in some open source web programming language. The popular choices include PHP, Perl, JSP etc. By Definition, ASP.NET is also a free language under ECMA specification so some free, open source CMS are also surfacing like the AxCMS and Umbraco CMS which are written in ASP.NET. But these are not completely free as of now as currently ASP.NET only runs fully on Internet Information Services or IIS which is a paid server by Microsoft. But projects like Mono which aims at porting the complete ECMA specification of .NET on Linux and Apache server are progressing very fast.
Basically, the Open Source CMSs available today are of 3 types:
Website Management CMSs: These include CMS systems which allow you to create and manage a complete, traditional looking website. These CMS are also called General Purpose CMS sometimes. Any type of site can be created with these but they are most of the time, overly complex. Examples are Joomla and Drupal.
Blog Systems: These are specialized types of CMS that are specially suited to create personal weblog kind of sites where posts are shown one after another in chronological order. These systems are very popular these days due to their simplified, easy to use interfaces that can be used to create a website quickly that shares your views with the rest of the world. In other words, a no-nonsense solution. Example is Wordpress
Wiki Systems: These systems are a kind of documentation systems which are editable by its registered users. So these are useful when more than one person's content is to be shown on the website. Example is MediaWiki CMS.
Wiki based Web Content Management systems are present almost everywhere but mostly people don't know when they are using one. If you ever used Wikipedia, you have already used a wiki system. A wiki is described as a documentation database that can be edited by number of users simultaneously. Wiki systems are mostly used for providing product documentations by many open source software authors as well as corporations. As of yet, Wikipedia is the largest application that uses the wiki format. The wiki system that Wikipedia uses is called MediaWiki.
MediaWiki is a free and open source wiki based content management system which has been released under the GNU general public license so anybody is free to obtain its source code, modify it to his own liking without paying any royalties to anyone. It is designed in PHP programming language and uses MySQL database at the backend to store its data both of which are open source and free as well. It is extremely powerful and so scalable by design that it can run on server farms that get billions of hits everyday by its users. As being a wiki based system, contents are organized in categories and is indexed with keywords, which makes it very easy, efficient and fast to search with its built in search engine. One of the features that makes it immensely easy to use is the use of WikiText which is a specialized XML based format designed for it. It lets users edit the content of the Wiki without learning any XML or HTML programming. Users are presented with a what you see is what you get editor where they can edit Wiki pages full of rich media like text, graphics, multimedia files and much more.
The wiki pages in MediaWiki support versioning and hence if by chance or by intention if some changes are made to the wiki data which are not approved, these can be easily deleted and previous contents can be restored without any problem. This is especially helpful in the cases where your wiki system is hit by some spamming software or human spammers. The interface of MediaWiki is fully customizable using both rich editing tools as well as by editing configuration text files manually by the administrator. Skin support is also there which in sense, is similar to the template systems used by other CMS systems. Using this system, the interface of the Wiki can be fully transformed without hurting any functionality.
The system is fully documented, using the MediaWiki itself. Apparently, not much is needed to be said about the MediaWiki system as it speaks for itself. It’s one of the most sophisticated and powerful Wiki CMS systems available today.
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