An Introduction and Drupal.

Back in the "Good Old, Bad Old Days" the pages of a website were all individually created; later, tools such as Dreamweaver used templates which allowed the basics of a page to be duplicated across the site. There is nothing wrong with this way of producing a website, indeed many sites, especially those with only a few pages, are still produced this way. The problems arise with larger sites when maintaining the content and the links between pages becomes very time consuming. There has to be a better way and this is where a Content Management System (CMS) comes into its own.

Simply put, a CMS is a software tool that not only enables content - text and images - to be created, edited and published (in a web page) but stores this content in a database. The CMS will have a default page to display the content but the designer is free to add other page designs. A good CMS will be able to automatically produce menus and links between pages BUT it cannot do all the work which is where this blog comes in.

For most of us buying an expensive CMS is not an option, we use one of the 'Open Source' (free) CMS's. Probably the most well known are Wordpress (not strictly speaking a CMS), Joomla and Drupal. Wordpress I'd used before but didn't like it, I found it very restrictive in the way it presents data. Joomla I've not used myself but I've heard excellent reports about it. So, when I produced Infoloko it was a close decison between the two but in the end  I decided to use Drupal for the simple reason that I'd tried it some years ago and liked it!

Drupal comprises a 'core' that provides the basic CMS functionality, anything else is added by modules that do a specific task such as producing a sitemap. 'Themes' change the way pages look (layout, colour etc) and Drupal comes with several with many more available for download. As in all things Drupal, the web designer can create and use their own customised modules and themes which can themselves be uploaded for others to use.

This has been the briefest of introductions but I hope it whets your appetite for more.