What is content management system?

What basically content management systems is?

A content management system is basically a convenience provided to the website manager to update content or content related activities instead of modifying static or dynamic files and repetitive uploads. Another feature which comes up with content management system is reporting on dashboard, its being widely used by famous open sources like joomla, wordpress and open cart etc.

• What is this article about?

  As WDWD team is emphasizing on those issues which delays the project finish dates, this article is exactly about the same issue where sometimes content management system contributes towards project delays.

• How a content management system can delay a project?

  Although we have a variety of projects in which we mostly do image galleries, user management system, contact us form etc. But it is not presumed that every website will require a content management system. If luckily or unluckily you do have various projects having requirement of a content management system too so what you understand from it? Have you ever answered these 10 questions before such a bad situation in which your project manager calls you for an emergency meeting and ask:
  

  1. Are you sure they needed a content management system?
  2. Do you think they needed Joomla?
  3. Do you think they needed wordpress?
  4. If you delivered your custom made CMS, were you sure that was required or not?
  5. Did they needed user management system or not?
  6. If website was involving images mostly so did you emphasized on image manipulation scripts in your CMS?
  7. If the project was related to video streaming so did you asked the client to get appropriate hosting for it and you chose the right content management system?
  8. If the project was related to mass communication, did you provided proper reporting and search in your content management system?
  9. Why you didn’t chose the right open source for it or enriched your content management system accordingly!!! (suppose if it is asked by your project manager?)

• How to deal with the situation that which open source should be chosen?

  1. You should be very specific about the project scope.
  2. Never provide those features which you think are good and should be provided and client is refusing to add those in his website.
  3. Never hesitate to work on those features which are required and communicated from client side initially and whole project is revolving around it.
  4. Never provide your ready made CMS as it is, even if you choose a CMS on client’s demand, still you should amend it a little according to the taste of the website. Put off those features which are not required, do add those features which were communicated and promised by your company to the client.
  5. Never use the same bullet to for the wolves and for the birds. Keep variety in your pocket.

• What is the simple CMS?

  1. A login page for administrator
  2. A welcome screen including your dashboard
  3. Change password and logout link
  4. Add new pages, edit and delete facility
  5. Pages should be added as having option of parent page and child page hierarchy
  6. Each page should have an option to upload unlimited images against it with sort order option
  7. Only three tables will be involved in it,
     1. Users
     2. Pages
     3. Images

• Few Frameworks & CMS used and suggested by WDWD development team:

  1. Joomla

  2. WordPress

  3. OpenCart

  4. CodeIgniter

  5. Pyro CMS

  6. CakePHP

  7. Kohana CMS

  8. PHPmotion

  9. Symfony