What is a Content Management System? Here’s a little background. Lots of websites have dynamic content. Meaning, the content is located in a database, usually MySQL, and they are simply dumped into a web template when the page is viewed. That way, if you decide to change the structure or template of your website, the content need not be changed. You wouldn’t really have to mess with anything. Since you have one main template, a change in the template is propagated throughout all the pages because all the pages are created dynamically and use the same template.

A content management system or CMS allows a user to manage this content. Excellent description, I know. Basically the user simply edits the content of the web site and not the actual pages. They don’t need to know any HTML, they don’t need to deal with the structure of the website they simply edit content.

Xpert.com.au has a nice write up on CMS.

Advantages of a Content Management System:

• Decentralized maintenance.
• Designed with non-technical content editors in mind.
• Configurable access restrictions.
• Consistency of design is preserved.
• Navigation is automatically generated.
• Content is stored in a database.

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First off, this is for those of us with our own servers. Not those of us on shared hosts, because we’re going to need access to the command prompt and MySQL commands, etc. Some shared hosts may allow some of these things, but most don’t.
Matt Wade Writes:

Just a quick note to recommend AutoMySQLBackup for your MySQL backup needs. This little gem does daily, weekly, and monthly backups. It handles all the backup rotations for you. It compresses the files, can backup to remote servers, email you logs, and much more.

Now if you’re like me and you’re on a shared host, here is an option for you. There is backupDB. I haven’t found something better than that thus far. One problem though, you have to have your own cron job to call it so that it’s automated.

Popularity: 4%

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LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. These are the elements you will need to start a very robust and reliable web server from the ground up. HowToForge has a brilliant tutorial on how to start everything. Now take note, this is a VERY detailed tutorial. You can’t really go wrong with this tutorial. We got step by step instructions, we go screen shots, we got it all.

The Linux platform used is Fedora Core 6. Some may claim that other distributions are better, they are more user friendly, etc. etc. And they would be right, however, In my opinion, as a production environment, you can’t beat Fedora Core 6. It is very stable and reliable and perfect for a stand alone web server. There are even instructions at the end to install a free web hosting control panel if you decide to resell hosting services.

They start out with downloading Fedora:

To install such a system you will need the following:

• Download the Fedora Core 6 DVD iso image or the 5 CD iso images from a mirror near you (the list of mirrors can be found here: http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html), e.g. ftp://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/fedora-core/6/i386/iso/FC-6-i386-DVD.iso
• an internet connection…

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Just in case you ever need to do this

Arrays to MySQL dates and back.

Simple conversion functions to change MySQL dates to arrays, arrays to MySQL dates.

Popularity: 3%

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When developing production sites for clients with little/no HTML experience this is a must. If your web contract does not include maintenance fees, then this is something that you simply must do in order to have your users freely update their websites. It’s a structure which is simple enough to develop and implement.

Alejandro Gervasio at DevShed writes:

Setting up the Foundation for an Extensible Website Engine with PHP 5
Building a dynamic website with a database backend is something that nearly every PHP programmer will need to do, usually sooner rather than later. If you haven’t done it yet (or even if you have), this two-part article series will show you how to develop a website engine that can generate pages on the fly from a simple database structure.

Since this is a two part series, I’m assuming that the portion on editing the database will some in the second part. But just to precede them for a minute, it can be seen that a simple backend could be designed. I would go one step further and insert HTML text into the database rather than simply text. In the backend it would be quite simple to incorporate a WYSIWYG editor such as FCKEditor of HTMLArea to allow users to edit the website easily.

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I’ve actually been meaning to try this myself, well a variation of it. I would , however be comparing these speeds from a C# Application performing data access to the SQL Sever 2005 or MySQL backend. Based on these tests it seems that I’d be better off with an ASP.NET connection, since this will be running on a windows environment.

I will definitely take Karl’s tests into consideration as I perform my own.

Karl Write:

Sidetracked with MySQL & SQL Server Performance
Here’s the short version:

1. This is only for inserting 500 rows into a 3 column table
2. InnoDB really seems screwed on Windows platforms running 5.x - Certainly don’t have anything conclusive, but I’d watch out
3. For my very simple test, MySQL on Linux blew SQL Server 2005 on windows out of the water.
4. On windows, ASP.NET’s connection to MySQL seems as fast as PHP’s

Popularity: 3%

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