Web Development has been with us for around 15 years. In the early days, all web sites were built using HTML - they were static, had a few pictures, links and text. Rapidly the technology evolved allowing interactive features and a much richer browsing experience.
With these early sites, each page was built individually. If you looked at a page called ‘About Us’ then behind the scenes, their was an HTML file probably called ‘aboutus.html’ which contained all of the page content, and a collection of associated images. Clearly, updating a site involved editing the ‘behind the scenes’ html file directly – and if that change was on every page (like a font change) – then every page had to be edited – a hugely demanding job. What’s more, with so many pages sitting on a server, the management of larger sites became a nightmare.
Step forward CMS – or content management systems. Built with a database behind the scenes holding the content, and then a language like PHP in the middle, which reads the database, interprets what it finds and then presents it to the user – generally taking the layout information (such as text font and colour) from a template. All a user has to do to edit the site is edit the database content. To change the look and feel of the site, the template file is updated. As the content is stored in a database, maintenance and management is easier, and updating becomes very straight forwards.
Initially, most of these CMS systems were custom built- however, at the end of the day, they all share a common theme – a database, a template and then some way of pulling out the data and displaying at as a website. Realising that many of the tasks could be duplicated from site to site, open source systems began to emerge in 2001 to 2005.
What is open-source?
Open source software is software that has been developed for use by the end user ‘without cost’. Often maintained by teams of many (often thousands) of volunteers, they develop fairy rapidly, and unlike their ‘paid for’ cousins (which are locked down to keep their intellectual property safe), can be their very ‘open’ nature be very easily customised.
Open Source CMS solutions grew rapidly and were adopted by many companies. With each version, improvements were made and security increased. Due to their open source ethos, many applications and add-ons have been developed for them, and most of these are available for free or minimal cost. Want a forum on your site? Done. For Free. Want a rotating image banner? Done. For Free.
As development grew, they were soon taken seriously, with many larger companies moving over to them – including Sony Europe (Drupal solution) and the BBC.
The two key systems are Joomla and Drupal – one isn’t better than the other – they are just different and suit different things.
5 Key Reasons to use an open-source CMS
1. Much of the development work has already been done. Why pay for your web developer to built a user interface and database access system when they are already provided with an open-source solution. Why re-invent the wheel..?
2. As they have thousands of users and developers, they improve rapidly and new features are regularly added.
3. You can customise to your hearts content!
4. There are thousands of modules and add ons to give your site extra functionality (which would normally be very expensive) for free or low costs (10’s of pounds maximum)
5. With a community of thousand of developers, you know that you can take your site to another company to support if required without the original company claiming that it is built on their code, thus tying you in.
Without doubt, Open_source solutions, which already run the backbone of the internet, will become the dominant force for CMS sites over the next few years. Unfortunately, most web development companies have invested time and effort learning how to do it the old way, and like dinosaurs can’t (or won’t) evolve. And what happened to the dinosaurs..?
