In part one, I talked about different kinds of web sites, and how for the larger content rich sites, a Content Mangement System is a must. Then I listed some of the obvious and not-so-obvious features you need to pay attention to when shopping around for one. In this article, we'll wrap it up, first with talking about learning curves and a few jargon items that will come in handy knowing, and end with CMS resources and some of the better ones out there.

Learning Curve

Ok, there's a few downsides you need to know before getting into Content Management Scripts. And it involves the two "T"s: Time and Technical. If you're not too technical, yes, there is a good chance you are going to run into some major problems. But maybe not. Depends on the following factors: the script you end up using, and how picky you are about getting things "just so". A third factor would be: what kind of sites you'll be making.

If you don't mind sites that are lacking in some features or which you can't easily tweek, and if you don't mind "out of the box" or default setups, you'll probably be fine. You should also go for one of the scripts that specify user-friendliness or ease of use. (Caveat: Many of them say that even if it's not true. Do your home work.)

Now, if you want to use different templates or site designs, especially one's that don't come with the script; if you want to tweek how things look and where they go, then you will need to roll up your sleeves, and be open to learning some things. You also need to, while not know coding necessarily, have somewhat of a technical mind, understand HTML without a WYSIWYG editor and read script docs. It is also very possible that you may need to start paying attention to some web specs that you've pretty much ignored up to this point.

(By the way, one way around a lot of this is to hire a techie employee under you. Sometimes it's worth it to free you up to develop the big picture. Again, depends on what you need, what you're willing to put into it, whether or not you have a technical mindset, and of course, your wallet. If you get a technical assistant, and you plan on growing your small company into something large, this person may end up being your COO or CTO in the future; so it doesn't hurt to find that person now. Just a thought.)

Each program, even a relatively easy one, is going to have some kind of learning curve; there is no way around that. Wait, wait, I thought the idea here with Content Management Systems was to make life easier, or to be more precise to make site creation faster and easier. It is. In the long run, over time, it most definitely is! Think of the tortoise and the hare. Ok, that's more slow and steady compared to fast. Maybe comparing fast at the start and faster is better. So think fuel-injected V6 Jetta racing a tricked-out old Firebird. So yes, the drawback is you will to spend time at the beginning, learning the program, learning to tweek it, learning related issues, creating templates, and then, once that's under your belt, you will wonder how you did without a content management system!

Some quick things you may need to learn or brush up on -- again, depends on your circumstance, the script you end up using, the type of sites you want to create and how much you are willing to put into it. Knowing some basic coding is helpful, though not necessary. Knowing a bit about MySQL will also give you a step-up. Just about all of these are database driven, and nearly all of them use the standard server database, namely MySQL. Also because one of the great things about a CMS is that all your pages throughout your site are uniform, most rely heavily on is CSS (cascading style sheets). Most also try to be XML (extended markup language) compliant. For some one-stop reading on these, check out http://www.w3schools.com.

Techno-Speak City.

The other thing you'll need to grasp is the jargon. It can get out there. Just as in business there is ROI (return on investment), vertical integration (if you own the book, own the printing company, if you own the presses, why not own the lumber yard, etc) and such, so in the land of the CMS jargon is used to express functionality, reign supreme. Don't let it throw you, is my advice. Just have a rough idea of what they're talking about. Because it's hard to shop for something if you don't know what they're saying. Some of the terms you'll come across often include:

Audit Trail:  In one word, admin logs. Can you see who did what when if you have partners, employees, editors working on the same program

Granular Privileges:  Does it allow permissions on a per page or section basis, not merely overall site.

Content Staging:  Does it have the ability to let you create something one place and put it another? Such as from one server to another server.

Package Deployment:  Can it save some elements so they can be used again

Centralized Asset Management:  Are all your doo-hickies found in one place

There's also some "cute" ones like Sandboxes (a place to try out things without publishing them) and Breadcrumbs (a "trail" that's printed on the page that shows the surfer where they've been, think of the DMOZ directory links). Some places you'll find crapola hyperspeak like "Multi-Channel Repurposing of Content" and "Structured Data Authoring Matrix" which, well, those places that get to that point in their terminology just plain scare me, to be honest. They just get too carried away with this jargon stuff and much too techie-oriented for us mere humans.

Further, and this is can be as amusing as it can be mildly confusing. Plugins, addons and various coding extensions that give each script greater power, functionality and user control. And each community or program has it's own internal names for these: If it's PhpBB, you use templates; if it's PhpNuke, it's themes; somewhere else it's skins. In PhpNuke you need addons or blocks; in PhpBB its hacks; in Etomite it's snippets and in WebGUI it's wobjects. (Yes, I wub you too! Sorry, couldn't resist.)

CMS Resources

A couple of nice CMS resources have opened up to make things a bit (hopefully) easier for the content management shopper.

Open Source CMS has a bunch of online demos, all in one place. Even when a specific CMS's own demo is offline because of server problems (happened to me twice last week) or if you can't seem to find the demo at the official site, this place has them. It also breaks each down by function (portals, forums, etc.)

CMS Matrix is another goodie. If the other place lists a hundred CMSs, then this place must have closer to 250. No demos, no categories, but there's a list of 80 features (such as, content approval, ssl logins, skins, etc) that you can see for each CMS program. And you can click several boxes and do a side-by-side comparison of the programs and their features. These two places together are superb for helping find what you need.

CMS Scripts

The above places give you a lot of choices. And surely there are many more scripts out there not listed at either of them. I'm certainly not going to try and compete here. However, to be helpful, the scripts listed below should give you a good starting point on scripts. Some I've used (and still use), others I've researched extensively and was impressed by them.

Portalware:  PhpNuke, PostNuke

Forums:  PhpBB, VBulletin, Invision

Articles:  dotWidget for Articles

Blogs:  b2evolution, Serendipity, WordPress, MyPHPblog

General:  Etomite, Big Medium, dotWidget CMS

Conclusion

Just to sum things up, we started out and in fact focused on if you're doing large sites, you need a CMS. Same is true for medium sites that you have a lot of updating of content on, be it a blog site, an articles resource, whatever. Linking and cross-linking manually is burdensome and as time goes on, will just be too arduous.

Small sites ... If we're talking a bunch of make 'em and forget 'em sites, and you probably want them all to have their own look and feel. This is especially true if you want to get listed in a directory such as DMOZ, but even for the mostly-automated search engines, let's say you do manage to grab several sites in the same category with good rankings. If they look like clones, eventually someone is going to write in and mention them to the SE, and chances are a human will come out, confirm it, and possibly ban you. Why take the chance?

So for small sites, be they a few or many, probably the old tried and true "manual" ways are best. If however you want to build a large site -- or several; or many medium-size but constantly updated sites, then you are going to need an edge and an advanced tool for creating your online empire. For these check out the content management systems out there. Yes, there will be a learning curve in the beginning, but overall the speed and efficiency once things are set up and you know what you are doing will make all the difference in the world.