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CMS: Creatively Maintaining Sites with a Content Management System

Running an online business can be very confusing, especially when considering how many tasks there are for the average business owner to complete on a daily basis. For this reason the website building industry has become a diverse market filled with a variety of different expertise fields, each one playing an important role in the success of a single website. You have web designers that specialize in improving the overall appearance of the website, programmers that specialize in writing code and creating web applications to boost the productivity of a website, freelance authors that populate the website with informative content, and various other experts that come together to form a collective effort towards the progression of the website.

Unfortunately, many website owners simply don’t have the money to outsource as much work as they’d like. Leaving them to handle a lot of the manual work involved with building and maintaining a website in solitude. Somewhere along the line, the immense amount of work it takes to create and maintain the project, deducts from the amount of creative fervor the website owner has.

Reducing Workload – Increasing Creativity

It’s a vicious cycle – the more you work, the less you’re able to conceptualize. As your creativity decreases, you have to work harder to maintain productivity, which ultimately is affected regardless of your efforts. The only way to stop this process is to reduce the workload you place on yourself, and as the old saying goes “Work smarter, not harder!”

Perhaps the easiest way to boost productivity, maximize creativity and improve the overall appearance and functionality of your website, is to use a capable content management system. Content management systems streamline the website creation and maintenance process by giving the user access to multiple user-oriented work modules. With a good content management system, users can automate content production and population, schedule tedious maintenance tasks, and even outsource work more efficiently than ever.

Outsourcing In Full

What is outsourcing? Outsourcing work is essentially defined as – delegating duties to employees. Sadly, most business owners who believe they are outsourcing work, are only partially doing so, as they still have to upload the work to the site once their employees send it in. While this doesn’t seem like much of a task, surely the individual that has to upload three hundred articles to various pages on his website would not agree. With a good content management system, you can outsource the uploading process to the very same employees that are responsible for producing the content, by assigning specific permissions to each employee. For example, one employee might be able to upload text, while another might only have permission to upload video content.

Focus on the Fun

It is common knowledge that those who engage in practices they enjoy, will ultimately be more successful at those practices. It can be very difficult to enjoy the production and progression of your website if you are constantly focusing on menial tasks. Using a solid CMS to outsource and boost productivity is a great way to restore the fun of building your business.

Using a CMS to Outsource Work

Building and maintaining a website is not exactly simple, especially when you’re trying to do it by yourself. Having a team of workers that you can collaborate with on a regular basis is the key to boosting your online business productivity. It is very rare that a successful website is built by a single individual without any help. The most successful websites are assembled by a team of professionals, working in conjunction with each other, each one carrying out a specific role in the operation. The problem is, this cannot be done confidently and securely without the help of an efficient content management system.

Saving Time By Granting Access

Even though you may have a team of writers, designers and programmers working with you full time on the project, uploading all of the content they provide can be a daunting task. In fact, you could spend hours of your own time just trying to incorporate the changes that you’re paying for. Instead of handling the situation manually yourself, why not let the employees upload the content to the site for you. You could easily save several hours a day by letting your employees upload their content personally. This would also give you a chance to work with the new improvements on a faster time scale. By the time you finish uploading all of the content provided, you’ll most likely have wasted half of the day, which could have otherwise been used to explore and organize all of the adjustments your employees could have made for you.

Deploying Your Employees

Once you have a team of reliable workers, you’ll need to know that they have access to certain areas of your site, in order to upload and incorporate their work into the design of your site. However, you do not want your employees to have access to all of the site, as this could present a security risk. Therefore, it is important that each employee be given privileges with which they can execute specific tasks with the permission of administrators only.  Using a good CMS will let you setup accounts for each employee and then set permissions for each account. For example, you can make it so your writers can only upload text to your site, or you can make it so the template designer can only add templates. These kind of restrictions will keep your employees from overstepping their boundaries.

Managing Workload With a CMS

Delegating duties to your employees is a very important part of keeping projects moving steadily. When an employee is confused about a certain issue, or the workload is not clearly stated, delays can result from poor communication. Administrators can communicate with their employees through an integrated messaging system. Each account is also given an email address at your domain, therefore each employee can also be contacted by external visitors of your site. This is especially useful for customer support employees. With the right CMS you can manage you entire staff with ease.

A Closer Look at PHPCow

PHPCow is one of the many open-source content management systems powered by the widely used PHP language. This particular CMS is geared more towards users who want to create online magazines, newspapers, and news portals.  PHPCow offers the promise of being able to design and manage your content-rich site in simple drag-and-drop fashion, requiring no experience in XML, CSS or PHP.

Key Features

PHPCow trumps the competition with a host of great features.  There is actually too much to cover, but are some of the features that stand out the most:

Template Manager – PHPCow gives users control over the look and feel of their site with a flexible template engine.  This is made possible by an intuitive Block Handling System that allows for deeper customization of the page layout.  While the template system lets you get very imaginative with your design, users also have the option to choose from a variety of free pre-designed templates.

Article Management – Users can customize their articles with attachments, slide shows, images and much more.  PHPCow’s article management module includes a built-in WYSIWYG editor that enables simple editing on the fly.  If you can use simple word processing applications like Microsoft Word, then you can excel with this user-friendly HTML editor.  You have the luxury to filter content by author, article type, and category, along with powerful visualization features for rendering your filtered content.

Content Syndication – PHPCow offers a way to increase your readership and search engine rankings with efficient content syndication.  The software includes an RSS Generator for creating RSS and Atom Feeds, something that can be done with a few easy clicks of the mouse from the administrative control panel.  You also have the ability to import and export RSS feeds from other sites, indication that PHPCow covers just about every critical aspect of content syndication.

Dynamic Menu Management - PHPCow allows users to customize dynamic menus, a feature that works hand in hand with its built-in category management module.  The system gives you complete authority over menu properties, letting you arrange horizontally or vertically, split menus, and even rebuild on the fly with a simple click.  PHPCow also allows you to create partial menus with different formats that can be displayed on individual pages opposed to the entire website.

PHPCow Requirements

For the most part, PHPCow has the same requirements of any PHP-based CMS.  It calls for an Apache web server, but can run on a Linux, Unix or Windows operating system.  The software also requires a MySQL 5.0 database.  Perhaps the most important requirements relate to the server configuration.  In order to get an optimal performance out of PHPCow, you will need a server equipped with the GDLibrary module and the latest version of the Zend Optimizer among other components.

Conclusion

PHPCow offers an arsenal of great features.  Aside from what has been mentioned here, there is also a built-in voting system, archiving, search functionality and bread crumb navigation.  The software appears to live up to its claims of ease of use and seems a little more capable than many of its open-source competitors.  Keep in mind that PHPCow is a not a free CMS and that a license will cost you at least $100.

Content Management Systems: Automating Your Website’s Success

The single most important attribute of your website is it’s content. The content is what keeps the visitors coming back, and it is what attracts them in the first place. Without relevant and informative content, your website will fail to rank highly in search engines, and ultimately all of your efforts will be in vain. Most people assume that once they’ve populated their website with a decent amount of good content, then they can stop building the website and let the rest happen on it’s own. However this “set it and forget it” approach simply does not work on an ever-growing platform such as the internet.

When people surf the web, they are looking for something, whether it be entertainment, information or a product/service. If you are able to give them what they want then your website will be successful, however your success will be short-lived if you cannot do this on a regular basis.  In order for your website to continue prospering, it must be updated daily. However, the process of updating a website manually is a tedious task, and ultimately it is very time consuming. This is where the use of a CMS (Content Management System) comes into play.

The Capabilities of Content Management Systems

A content management system is an online application, used to manage, collect and distribute vast amounts of relevant content automatically. A good CMS gives the user a platform in which they can effectively organize, archive, create, edit, publish, gather and spin content related to their niche. Content can be distributed and published evenly across a website on a scheduled basis ( which is perfect for a blog or news-related site). Content can also be gathered from other websites using RSS feeds, and then automatically “spun” using innovative extensions known as “content spinners.” Digital media such as videos, pictures and music can be gathered and embedded automatically,  simply by selecting a few preferences. In fact, with a good content management system and a few blogging plugins, your entire website can be populated with hundreds of interesting pages in just a few hours!

The Simplicity of Content Management Systems

Judging by the features you’ve just learned about, you’d think that learning how to use a CMS would be quite difficult. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Content management systems are designed specifically for novice users, and every function within the CMS is controlled via simple settings and preferences. Users have access to unlimited options, as a good CMS is expandable beyond limits. Tasks that would normally require advanced web design knowledge can now be completed in a mater of minutes by even the most novice users.

A good CMS will not only help you populate your site with content, but it will also populate it with visitors, by automatically posting your content to many leading social bookmarking sites simultaneously. You may be wondering how massive this software must be to accomplish all of this, yet the most amazing part is that no bulky software installs are required, as the software is hosted online and can be accessed from any computer, including some mobile devices.

Life Without Your CMS

I am sure you’re impressed by the CMS features you’ve just learned about, however these features are only a small fraction of what can be done with a good CMS. Now that you know what these programs are capable of, try imagining how long it would take you to do just one task I’ve mentioned. For example, how long would it take you to submit every article on your site to 50 bookmarking sites individually? If your site has only 50 articles, and you submitted each one to 50 bookmarking sites, you would be sitting there for at least an entire day working. Now imagine accomplishing the same task, in the time it took you to read this article!

An Overview of Xoops CMS

Content management systems allow a webmaster to expand their website considerably, without the added stress of organizing the process manually. The greatest aspect of these content management systems is that they are user-friendly to the extent that even the most novice webmaster can master them within a few short hours.  One content management system that is particularly user-friendly is the Xoops (eXtensible Object Orientated Portal System).

Xoops is a free and open-source content management system.  It’s ease of use and feature-rich interface make it highly suitable for novice webmasters looking to enhance their website’s content quickly and easily. Xoops is also used by professionals to create corporate business websites and blogs. All that is needed to enjoy the power of Xoops is an Apache web server, MySQL and PHP. There are so many features that come with Xoops, it is hard to pin-point all of them within one article, but nonetheless the following overview will give you an idea of what you can expect when using this robust content management system.

The Control of Xoops

Xoops provides complete control of every administrative element, giving you the ability to set limits and grant access rights with certain users. This will allow you to keep bothersome users from posting irrelevant or obscene content. With Xoops you are the boss of your domain. Xoops also provides theme-based template systems that give users the ability to enhance their websites overall design. One extremely impressive and unique feature of Xopps is that it allows you and your users to change the design of web pages, depending upon the permissions granted to that user.

The Freedom of Xoops

As Xoops is an open-source software, it can be enhanced with as many add-ons and modules as you’d like, and over time a good programmer can turn this already incredible software into an unbelievable content management system. All modules and add-ons can be enabled, disabled, installed, and uninstalled through the extremely user-friendly module administration system. Xoops also offers extensive user management, allowing webmasters to locate certain groups of users via a wide array  search criteria. Webmasters can also let users send private messages and email through an easy-to-use template based messaging module.

The Flexibility of Xoops

Xoops is also supported by many users and developers worldwide. With programmers and developers that span across the  globe and countless supportive websites in just about ever major language, it is easy to see why the popularity of Xoops has exploded so quickly. Not only is their multi-lingual  support groups, but the program itself is also multi-lingual supporting many languages including Korean, Chinese, and Japanese among others. Xoops is also ideal for the webmaster looking to enhance their search engine optimization, as there are numerous compatible SEO enhancing plugins available. Using these add-ons will have your site indexed at a higher page ranking with ease, and it will make the process of search engine optimization extremely simple. Xoops has already won multiple CMS awards due to it’s amazing features, ease of use and extensive multi- lingual support.