content management systems

For companies in the media sector, content is their stock in trade.  They understand content as a woodworker understands the grain of a quarter sawn Birdseye Maple board.   In my tenures with these companies I have learned an invaluable, oft unbendable truism that has helped me to model Content Management Systems. Content cannot actually change its representation to fit a framework, frameworks need be engineered to fit content. More simply put, articles published in monthly magazines are usually issue-based in relation to each other and need to be managed by a tool designed to handle that content representation.   They cannot or should not be shoe-horned into a blogging tool simply because its free, has a funny sounding name and you like the pretty icons that come with it.

Recently I consulted a media company on how they can use open source CMS tools to help with a sub-segment of their Content Entry work.  As I looked out at the many many many many available options, I felt a Sazbean post coming on.  Are people becoming overwhelmed by all the CMS choices out there, giving up, and settling on the first tool they can get working?  What is the likelyhood that the CMS you got working is the right one for the kind of content you have?

Joomla was one of the CMS applications that popped out early on as a tool that might help my client.  Joomla is a free, open sourced content management system forked from the Mambo server PHP code base.  If you have used Mambo, as I had years ago, you will see it continues its full featured administrator tools. While both  Joomla and Mambo have tons of components that can extend the base functions, my experience is that they tend to stretch the content to fit into the framework.  Best to evaluate it on its base strengths.  What Joomla does well is supporting post based sites such as blogs, news, and info distribution feeds.  If you content is periodic, self-contextualized and mostly text and images then this tool will scratch your itch.

Here are some tips on how to use Joomla

• The base class in Joomla for content is an Article.
• Joomla doesn’t really support the concept of a ‘page’.  If you want to create an ‘About Us’ page, for example, you are going to create an Article.  Then you will link a Menu item with an internal link to that article.  Using the term ‘Article’ to describe the base class for content is an example of how Joomla’s and Mambo’s designers see the world: as periodic content
• Articles should be structured:  Sections have Categories, Categories have Articles.
• Categories and Sections can be used as indexes, allowing Joomla to pull all Articles under a Section or Category
• Like many CMSs, images are a separate class, allowing for the reuse of images without saving duplicates.  Use the Media Manager to upload your images and then use them in your articles by hitting the button at the bottom of the wysiwyg editor
• Menus drive appearance of content.  When you create a menu link you can set show/hide options on different parts of content on the right.  Two menu links can have different settings and point to the same article.  The article itself is unchanged, only the display changes.
• Blog views is usually by date, but it can be changed to order in the menu link preferences
• Joomla has different rights levels for administrator access, so you can limit editors to only things they are allowed to break
• Joomla also has restricted options so that only logged in people can view the content
• Sites are made up of modules and plugins.  The menu is a module, as is a poll or a login widget.
• Modules and plugins can be told to show up where you want them, left, right, breadcrumb, user1 etc.  These are setup by the template creator as to where they show up in the page
• Oh, and tons of free templates are available, which some people call skins.  Use your favorite search engine for ‘joomla templates’

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