CMS Guide
As more and more people have started to go online, a new era of socializing on the net has begun. The communication aspect of the web is one of the most important and is widely used by people as a cheap and quick way of connecting to their families, pals and even for finding new friends and like thinkers online. The idea of a “Global Village” is slowly coming alive. And it’s only human, for people, to form communities with other people who think alike. Discussing over topics, communicating and sharing knowledge are some of the key things that people do in communities. While this is very easy to do in real life, on the web you need some specialized tools for that. The idea of a community or forum fits perfectly in the philosophy of a Content Management System since ongoing, parallel and cluttered content will be generated by people in such a concept and a CMS can do the job of organizing this clutter very well. So the idea of a specialized type of CMS system materialized very soon and today, we have many software are available for us to create online forums. The options include some paid as well as free software.
For using a Forum CMS also known as Bulletin Boards, one need to have a server of his own or at least own some space on a commercial web server. Some of the popular choices available include some free software like PHPBB which is written in PHP and comes under GNU General Public License as well as some excellent paid options like vBulletin which is also PHP based but comes with paid technical support.
A Forum CMS or Bulletin board provides the concept of User Accounts to its users at its very core. Users fill a simple form to register on the forum and become member of it. Mostly forum communities are based on a basic theme out of which the community forms. The administrator of the forum can divide the forum into sub-forums and so on. When a user wants to discuss a new issue, he/she creates a “Thread” where other users can also come and post their views. Most forums also permit use of multimedia content and HTML in the posts apart from text and also let users to "attach" file to their posts much like they do with their e-mail. Some users, on sole consideration of the administrators are made moderators of the forum to help him with administration of the forum.
So in this way, forums provide excellent opportunity for people to go online and share their thoughts, views and knowledge with the rest of the world and make new friends in the process.
With the advent of Web 2.0, more and more people have started doing things online that no one ever thought of before. With the increase in “Richness” of the web, new possibilities have become visible for regular people to take advantage of. The notion of having an Online Identity of oneself is a norm now-a-days and this includes e-mail ids, social networking profiles, forum memberships and recently, Blogging. A Blog or Weblog is like an online electronic diary of a person which is open to the world for reading to get to know the person and his ideas better, a great way of self expression. Since the idea of blog is so interesting, it excites people from all fields. This is where the “richness" of web kicks in and the solution to the common problem of not having technical expertise in web programming comes in form of a Specialized Content Management System called Blogging Software. This is a tailor made CMS system which is in essence a Web CMS but is designed to support the idea of blogging more rather than managing a whole website.
Blogging software are available in two forms, Developer Hosted, in which the creator of the software also host the system on his servers and user create their account on this system to create their personal blogs, And the others are called User Hosted as they are hosted by the person who use them on his/her own server/web space.� Blogger, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces and VOX are some popular Developer Hosted Software while Wordpress, LiveJournal, Typo and Serendipity are some examples of user hosted blogging software. Some of these like Wordpress are available in both forms too. Most of the blogging software is free and written in languages like PHP, Perl and ASP.NET.
Blogging software provides the user with What You See Is What You Get tools to edit his entries in his online diary known as Post. These posts are displayed on the main page of the blog in chronological order. The Writer has the option to arrange these posts in categories and sort them by assigning them keywords. These categories are also displayed in a sidebar. Apart from that, user can place premade plug-ins on their blog pages that enhances the capabilities of the blog. Monetizing options are also available by the option of placing ads from online services like Google. And to do a quick makeover of the whole blog without any hassle, the idea of Themes is also supported.
So all in all, blogging software makes it very easy for even layman to have an attractive web presence of themselves.
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