The Web Hosting Blog of Host Color

Welcome to Mary’s Corner, a new column on the Host Color blog that is intended to be both informative and educative, and to help you make the best use of your Host Color hosting account and to exploit all the features available to you when building your websites and creating your online presence.

There are many ways to build a website or web application. Since you’re here at Host Color, I assume that that’s your interest, getting hosting and then establishing a presence on the web.  Whether it’s just a hobby site for yourself, a personal blog to express your thoughts to the world, or a website for your small or large business, or even a social networking site (maybe you’re aspiring to build the next Facebook?), you’re no doubt looking to learn what the best tools are for getting your site up and running.

Not so long ago, it used to be that if you wanted to build a website with more than just a few HTML pages you had to either become an expert at some web development language like PHP or ASP, know a lot about databases, or else pay someone else a lot of money to set your site up for you, and then pay them some more money to maintain it and add content for you.  But this is no longer the case. Now we have the option of using content management systems in place of trying to build and design our own complex custom ways to publish our data on the web.

What do I mean when I say Content Management Systems?  Well, according to Wikipedia, a Content Management System (CMS) is a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer based.   In general, when I talk about CMSs I will be referring to Web Content Management Systems, which is a CMS designed to simplify the publication of web content to Web sites, in particular, allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files. (Wikipedia)

Now, with the advent and explosion of open source Content Management Systems (abbreviated CMS), you can have your website up and running with just a few clicks of your mouse. Moreover, the websites you create with these CMSs are relatively painless to maintain and update, and with a little interest on your part, and the willingness to spend a little time learning how the CMS works, you can run your website with minimal cost and retain full control. Further, a lot of these open source content management systems are free to download and use and are maintained by strong communities who keep the code updated and as cutting edge as possible.  There is a lot of peer support available through these large communities which cuts the costs of support to almost nil in all but the more complicated setups.

Functionality?

As I mentioned before, you don’t necessarily need to be a skilled coder to learn how to use these content management systems and to build websites with them, but if you do know how to code, you have a big advantage when it comes to open source CMSs because you can create your own customizations and roll out your own unique additions to the code.  These are called by various names depending on the CMS - plugins, addons, modules, snippets, extensions, etc.  You are free to share these with the community or to just keep them for your own use.  For most CMSs there is an ever growing repository of such addons/plugins/modules to meet most common needs of website builders.

Design?

The one question that arises is this, if many people are all using these content management systems because they’re free, won’t my site resemble other people’s sites?  Not necessarily! This is the beauty of it all.  While all CMSs will come with a default theme, you are not restricted to keeping this look.

Your site can look and work as uniquely as you want it to even though it’s running on the same base code as many other sites.  This is accomplished through the concept of theming (also known as templating) which allows for you to “skin” your site to look and feel unique. For most CMSs you can find a selection of free themes that you can import into your site, or you can learn how to create your own themes with.  One nice compromise is that you can take existing free themes and with a little CSS knowledge modify them to fit your own needs.  There are many options out there.

Beyond CMSs like MODx, Drupal, Wordpress and such, there are many other open source scripts that are available to help you build other types of websites such as forum scripts (SMF, phpBB, etc), e-commerce scripts to help you sell your stuff online (OSCommerce, Ubercart, etc), and more. Host Color makes a large number of these open source CMSs and scripts available for you to install, play with, and test for your own use.  With just a few clicks you can get a lot of these scripts running and open new possibilities to what you can create on the web.

In upcoming articles, I will be exploring some of these CMSs and scripts and teaching you how to use them to make your online vision a reality.  This column will be dedicated to helping you use Host Color optimally by utilizing the different open source scripts available to you.  This column will have tutorials and articles on different aspects of building and maintaining your website using these open source scripts, particularly

Remember that if you have any questions, you can always visit the HostColor forums for help and support.

About Mary:
I am a part time web developer and full time web enthusiast who is very committed to open source technologies and promoting their potential for use across the web. Some of the technologies that I am involved in are MODx CMS and Drupal.  I am also a fan of Wordpress, SMF, phpBB, and any and all open source endeavors.  I enjoy learning new things and teaching people what I know in ways that are simple (I hope) to understand.  You can find me on the Host Color Forums (username is mary), at my blog (The Coding Pad) or follow me on twitter (@einsteinsboi).