So, Do you want to make your own website? Great, for this you need to aware of some Internet technology terms and programming languages. Content Management System (CMS) is easy tool to develop or maintain your website. So now you must be thinking what is a Content management system? How we can install it? which programming language it uses? and many more questions. In this blog I have tried to explain the concept of CMS and some popular CMS in opensource technology.

So what is a Content Management System? Wikipedia definition is something like this:

A content management system (CMS) is the collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based. The procedures are designed to do the following:

• Allow for a large number of people to contribute to and share stored data
• Control access to data, based on user roles (defining which information users or user groups can view, edit, publish, etc.)
• Aid in easy storage and retrieval of data
• Reduce repetitive duplicate input
• Improve the ease of report writing
• Improve communication between users

A procedure is also call a function.This is the basic idea about a content management system.Most of the content management system is build using PHP (Hypertext Preprocess) which is server side scripting language which is usually executed inside a web server and there are some other which are written in Java also.

Some of the famous opensource CMS’s:
– Drupal
– Joomla
– WordPress
– TYPO3

WordPress is also a Content Management System but is more specifically for building blogs. I have downloaded wordpress and installed it in my localhost (also my website www.sandykadam.com is in WordPress) and have tried ‘n’ number of themes and plugins provided by wordpress community. If you are interested to try out wordpress to build your blog please do visit its official website http://www.wordpress.org/. You can explore more and it is very easy to learn wordpress compared to other Content Management Systems. We can also build websites using wordpress apart from blogs.

Drupal is a Content Management System(CMS) .Rather than saying it only as a CMS, we can also say Drupal as a Content Management Framework(CMF).What is the difference between a CMS and CMF? Let me explain to you the difference between the two with an example which have been given in the Drupal documentation. Common CMS’s can be considered as a truck already build, if we need to make any change you have to get it to the workshop and only the mechanic can do the job for you, but the think is that you only need to known how to drive the truck that is not a difficult task as compared to building a truck. In CMF as name says is a framework which provides a set of parts using which we can make truck, car or bus anything that we wish to make. But it take time to learning how to combine these part to get the required result. But once you master it you can do wonders with Drupal.

Drupal is said to be CMF because it is modular. So what is modular? Drupal is build up of many modules (PHP code set) each module provide a specific functionality. There are two types of modules, Core modules and Contributed modules. Core module come with the Drupal(core libraries) download and we do have the provision to disable it. But contributed modules are modules which are contribute by the members of Drupal community, these modules can be enabled or disabled at our wish. The provision of allowing the addition of extra module is a advantage. All these makes Drupal very flexible for developer to make website of there taste.

More about Drupal can be explored from drupal.org. If you are planning to contribute to Drupal then you have to make an account in drupal.org and join Drupal groups at http://groups.drupal.org/groups