Wednesday, July 19, 2006

CMS: The Learning Curve

I've found something new - and so I'm wasting inordinate amounts of time (can time be an amount?) trying to make it all work.

It's a content management system (CMS), which uses a database to run web sites. Most old sites (like mine) are static pages. I make 'em, put them on the Web, you look at 'em. They don't change. With CMS I can split the page up into many small pieces, and then decide which piece will be displayed where, adding new items whenever I like, and others can add material as well - oh yes, I plan to involve you too!

It's very early days. I only got the stuff to work yesterday, at www.lockwoods.co.uk

You'll notice that many pages still talk about Joomla! see www.joomla.org This is Open Source software, and is to be highly recommended. Instead of one company offering you a product, in order to make a profit, open source is a collaborative effort, with many thousands of people: programmers, developers and users all making contributions, which they all share.

A similar system is Open Office, see http://www.openoffice.org/ which is an office suite to rival that bloke who made a lot of cash out of IBM all those years ago - what was his name? William Dawes? Can't remember.

Sorry to get technical - but I'm having great fun swimming through the treacle of instructions that rarely make much sense.

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