By pengyou on
I am not a computer idiot...I have a fair amount of computer knowledge and experience. In trying to figure out what a cms is I have been reading webpages. I am tired of hearing that Drupal is a CMS. What is a CMS? I understand content. I understand management... I understand system
but that doesn't help one bit! Can someone give me an example?
Thanks!
Comments
What is a CMS for?
Back in the early days of the internet every individual page required a physical html page with that content to exist somewhere on a server.
Content management systems store the content of a page in a database, using one small collection of files (known as a theme in the Drupal world) to determine the visual style of the page.
Using a system like this allows you to make a change to the theme that affects every page on your site. Additionally having the content in the database makes it possible to edit that content "live" through your internet connection instead of manually editing a physical file on your personal computer and uploading it to the server.
Drupal (and virtually any other CMS) is basically the collection of code that pulls the content from the database, and makes these live changes possible.
Hmmmm that is starting to
Hmmmm that is starting to make sense! Gosh, you are smart :) how does this differ from, say, WordPress? I have read things about integrating phplist to Drupal. What can that do?
In an earlier post, I
In an earlier post, I wrote:
(and others found it a good summary of the concept)
Also, the idea of a cms is that it allows you to add and edit content online, so you don't need applications on your computer (other than a web browser) in order to maintain your site.
Wordpress is also a CMS, but it's main purpose blogging. Drupal is an all-round cms. You can make a blog with it, but it has many more features (especially when combined with contributed modules), such as forums, event calendars, custom content types, community tools, user profiles, mailing lists, online shops... Well, it can do a lot of different things.
I don't know what phplist does, so I don't know what integration with drupal would mean. But let's turn this around: what do you want to do with your website? Maybe you can draw us a sketch of your ideal website - then we can tell you what Drupal could mean for you.
Thanks! This site has the
Thanks! This site has the most informative help of any program's site i have looked. This is a scary thing to say but I think I am starting to understand.
I will eventually want to do ecommerce but not right away. I need to have forums and blogs, a calendar..music...I would like to have a node called "youtube" if possible and insert video from youtube....picture galleries from my travels around China. I want to post crossword puzzles on my blog..(I have seen software that will make files that can do this) have video that I have taken myself posted. I also need to send out an e-letter once a month to about 200 people (that is what I use phplist for)...have a site map. Probably 75% of my needs are to display information. I will have a "column" called "New for me", "My students", "Business as usual", "Word of the week", "Geography" and "culture". Each one of these columns will contain pics, graphs, charts, text and possibly audio or video as well as links to other places. I also would like to make a place to put links to all of the freebies that I use. It would be helpful if I could have other sites like facebook and myspace draw info from my drupal space. And one other thing that is important. I am making a blog for my home organization - under a different domain name - and will also give each member space to make their own blog. On the org blog there is a column called "student of the month". Members need to be able to display the text and pictures from this column on their own blog automatically. I want to have a section that will draw articles from magazines and newspapers that I often read so that I don't have to keep "flipping pages"...I want a theme that looks very much like this: http://www.bloggeries.com/forum/wordpress-themes-blog-templates/4813-wor...
Is there a template like this available for Drupal? I have noticed that there are not so many templates available for Drupal. Is that because it has a smaller user base, because it is easier to make ur own with Drupal or because Drupal users as a whole tend to be much more intelligent and can do their own stuff? :) So....that is for starters...I am sure that as I get to know more about it I will have more requirements :)
Wow, that's a lot of
Wow, that's a lot of information... I don't see anything which is absolutely impossible, but it will also depend on the interaction design you want. Drupal content categorization built into the core; it sounds as if you will be using that a lot.
For sending out the newsletter, there is a module called Simplenews, but you could also look into integrating Drupal and PHPlist.
Drupal is very adaptable for displaying all kinds of information. The CCK module allows you to create your own content types from 'building blocks' like text, email addresses, links, images, categories, links to other content, youtube video's...
An RSS aggregrator is also available, so you can pull in content from other RSS enabled sites.
There are quite some themes available on http://themegarden.org, but I don't know if you consider this 'a lot'. I think the average Drupal user (I mean the people who build sites with Drupal, not the end users) is a little more technical than wordpress users. This might explain why they choose to build their own themes. Also, I think lots of sites built with Drupal require a cutom theme instead of a standard one. Corporate sites for instance need to be unique, it would look very unprofessional if a company's website is identical to other sites.
I think it would be good for you to set up a test server, install Drupal 5.7 (some important modules have not been ported to Drupal 6 yet) and get your hands dirty. This may be a little overwhelming at first, but there is a lot of documentation here on drupal.org, so I'm sure you will soon find out if Drupal is right for you.
WordPress as a CMS
WordPress is a CMS, as long as your content is a series of blog posts. While there are plugins to allow you to have image galleries and there is a multipleuser fork of WordPress called WordPressµ for multiple users, it is primarily designed to be a blogging platform for an individual. Sure, you can bolt on some functionality to the basic blogging platform, but that's about it.
If you want to have blog entires and discussion forums and ecommerce and image galleries and create your own content types (check out the CCK project) then Drupal is more your speed.
some links for you
Google search second link leads to wikipedia
Locally > Documentation >> Getting started >> Before you start >> Overview
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide