CMS: first steps

Hello!

I would like to start exploring the world of CMS.

Unfortunately I know little about it and I need tutorials starting from installation and so on.

I tried searching for Mambo tutorials (apparently it's the most popular) but didn't come across anything really helpful.

Any good suggestions for tutorials?

Thanks!

 

Well you can start reading here

 

Thank you for the link. That is the next chapter for me too.

 

I looked at the 2 nukes, Mambo, and a few others but I settled on Xoops because of the user support forums activity level. There were tons of modules and tons of help changing modules. The modules are installed very easily. And changing the layout of the site is simple as most everything is done with simple templates.

I may try Mambo next as it is very popular, but Xoops was an excellent choice for me to start learning about CMS.



Later,
Rob

 

I was put off a little by Mambo, it looks a little too advanced for me at least, with few good tutorials.
I tried looking into cmsmadesimple next, but it's not clear enough either.
I am going to check out Xoops then and see what impression it gives.

Opensourcecms is good for a general idea, thanks everyone!

 

Tried em all, then wrote my own.

 

If you are really getting into things, typo3 is a great solution - but it's a bear to get installed and have a site up and running.

As far as the different CMS's go, I'd suggest building a small site with a few different ones and seeing which features you really will find useful. If you just want something like a rolling news page, some of the simpler blogging solutions work great. Some have great plugins that you will find really useful depending on the kind of site - like calendars, directories, forum integrations, photo gallery integrations, etc. Skinning the site to your look and feel can have varying degrees of difficulty too. Some systems it's just a matter of touching up the css files, with others you have to learn a templating language and even then you may end up dissatisfied with what you can reasonably do.

I guess it really depends on what you mean by content management system. Almost anything can store an article in the database and display it - and building your own system to do just that isn't that difficult either.

Then there's the subject of SEO. What CMS is easiest to work with for SEO? Who knows, but they all have difficulties as far as on page SEO is concerned, whether it is linking structure, difficulty in editing metatags, page structure that is too heavy, etc.

Changing from one CMS to another is a bear. Look around and figure out exactly what you want to do and go with the one that most closely fits your needs.

 

It looks like a huge step (forward).

For the time being I have downloaded and easily installed Xoops.

I'm a bit confused about what to do now with it, but hopefully I'll learn soon how to make the best out of it and then maybe try another one (Mambo or cmsmadesimple, I don't know) with another site.

For now thanks very much to everyone!

For my next problems with CMS and Xoops in particular I'll start a new thread.

 

The only one I found that I liked was drupal. There's a page out there that will let you see and play with just about every CMS there is before you install. Some of the *nukes have terribly written code that is a nightmare to modify. typo3 seemed a bit complex, and not very intuitive, to me anyway. I was looking for something that was easy and simple, and easy to modify.