George asks: So I keep hearing about Content Management Systems and I want to know more. When I looked into starting my own website I was put off by all the techno speak and talk of HTML code, CSS, Javascript and other technobabble.  Also I have some friends who started websites a few years ago and they tell me that maintenance has become a nightmare - will a content management system help.

Dean: Put simply a content management system is a system that helps you manage the content on a website. I know George, I know - you could have guessed that from the title. Of course you want a better explanation than that.  With an old style website you built each page individually out of a special code called html. You manually linked one page to another using this code. When you added a new page to your site you had to go back and edit your previous pages to also link to the new page. At its worst you could end up editing an awful lot of pages.  Things did get slightly better over the years - there were tools that helped the web administrator automate this process. Typically these tools ran on his PC and he maintained all of the working files on his PC occasionally placing updated files onto the internet. Of course only this one person (or a very small very well co-ordinated group) could do this because only they had access to these 'working files'.

George:

And now?

Dean: Well a Content Management System such as Joomla takes this to the next level. By doing a similar task of automation, but doing it through the website itself we are freed from both the bottleneck of having any one person holding all of the files and from the danger that our one developer will disappear leaving us stranded.  With a CMS anyone who we give the correct permissions to, can log into a special area of the site to edit existing web pages or create new pages. Also, because this process is interactive, so much more is possible. Because sections of our pages are built 'on the fly' using information stored in a database together with clever computer programming (also known as coding or scripting) our site can offer interactive features that react to user input. Such things as contact forms or online votes (also known as polls) with real time viewing of the results to-date are possible. Additional blocks can be positioned around our pages showing the visitor the latest aricles added or the the most commonly visited pages on the site.  And with clever coding a CMS such as Joomla can allow a third party programmer to create an add-on that can add a whole new feature such as an online store or video playing elements - a whole new world of possibilities is opened up.

In summary, I hope it can be seen that a Content Management System such as Joomla allows an end user with a moderate level of computer skills to create, maintain and manage an interactive, expanding website with a minimum of fuss and far more flexibility than was previously possible.