Hands on: Simple content management

Options for updates
Let’s start by looking at the types of updating that people might want to be doing on their site, since that will affect the choices of how you make it available.

For some sites, it’s just going to be enough to provide a few very basic spaces where the latest news can be updated – for example, a store that’s using a shopping-basket system may need nothing other than a simple way for the manager to tell people about shipping over the holiday period, or special offers.

In this sort of situation, a fairly simple method of updating just parts of some pages is probably enough – something like the inline editing that you can do with plug-ins for Firefox, as David mentioned in his email.

Other sites may need more extensive updating, but still need to be kept within a well-designed structure. One of my own projects falls into this category, with a database of shops, links, software downloads and so on. For this type of site, some form of database system is probably appropriate – a content management system (CMS).

Content management systems
A few years ago, these were really the province of big firms, and you found them mostly powering large websites, like our own PCW site. Now, however, there are lots more options.

Blogs are based on CMS principles, and there are plenty of other open-source tools around, which we’ll cover in later months. You can, of course, go down the ‘roll your own’ route, which may sound like a lot of work but, if your site is based on fairly straightforward and well-defined categories of information, you may find it’s much simpler than you imagine.

As we’ve seen here before, tools such as Dreamweaver can take care of creating database-driven pages for users to find the information they want, as well as for the site owners to update and delete information. We’ll give a mini-tutorial on that in a future issue.

This month I’m going to look at browser-based editing; there are various solutions available for this, depending on the browser you want to use.