Back in January, 2001, I was involved in a project while I was working at Progress Software Corporation that later became known as Progress Dynamics (I’m going to shorten the name to Dynamics for the rest of this article). The whole idea behind Dynamics is that you design your application components and the definition is stored in a repository – a relational database. At run time, the design of the UI is read from the repository and the UI is rendered based on the definition.

In version 2 of the product, we added functionality to allow the user interface to be rendered in a browser using dynamic HTML and JavaScript. The whole idea was to assemble the application once and render it for any platform and ultimately that could have included .NET, Eclipse RCP, and any other imaginable UI.

How does this have anything to do with content management? Well here’s the thing… content management systems essentially store the definition of the content of a web site in a repository – again, a relational database – and render the web pages from the repository. The subtle difference is that the rendering engine for Dynamics is a set of 4GL programs. For a content management system it is a set of programs (various languages including PHP), cascaded style sheets, HTML, XHTML, DHTML and JavaScript.

One of the things that was really cool about Dynamics was the ability to add custom modules to extend Dynamics for your application’s needs. Most of the content management systems have a pluggable architecture that allows you to do the same thing and you can even customize the rendering engine to your own needs.

As with Dynamics, the focus of content management systems is to get the content writer (application developer in the case of Dynamics) to focus on building content rather than worrying about editing CSS, HTML and XHTML.

The joy of the repository in both cases lies in the functionality it provides for searching and organizing the content or application components.

So now you can see why I like the content management system idea. In the same way as I still believe in the core principles of Dynamics – a rendered UI that is portable across multiple technologies – I also believe that content management systems provide the same flexibility for web sites.

I should point out that content management systems are not new. There are many of them out there and there are some very good, expensive commercial ones out there. If you are a large enough enterprise to warrant the expense of the investment in a commercial, 24x7x365 content management system, you should go ahead and look at these. Some of the top contenders in this area are:

• Interwoven
• Percussion
• SDL Tridion
• Vignette

I’m not in that market.

I am a firm believer in the open source initiative and there are a number of very good open source solutions out there. I had also narrowed my focus to something that ran on Linux with Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP). There are a number of solutions in this area and given the timeframe that I had committed to, I needed to go on some recommendations.

I settled early on on two alternatives, and I went with them because my web hosting provider supported them both. The alternatives were Joomla and Drupal. Early on it seemed that Joomla was the best solution. It seemed to be really easy to work with and getting content onto the site was snap. I was up and running in no time so I selected Joomla for my personal web-site.

Of course, requirements change and when I left Earthlink in April, I needed to get our company web-site, Intangere, LLC up and running fairly quickly. At this point I started looking for new modules, themes and options for extending Drupal.

That was when I realized that Joomla may not have been the best choice. I then started looking into the extension mechanism for Joomla, and although it can be extended, there are some problems doing it. Drupal has a much larger selection of new modules and themes than Joomla does and it also provides a very extensive, well-documented extension model so that it is relatively easy to build on.

Both of these options require some understanding of how they work. They are not outstandingly intuitive when you first start working with them, but once you get the hang of them, they do the job really well. Drupal just does it a little better.

Intangere, LLC, is a completely Drupal-based site and we are very satisfied with what you can achieve in a fairly short period of time.

It’s very interesting to me that these content management systems are using the same ideas as we had when we built Dynamics back in 2001. There is clearly something to the idea of rendering from a database and it’s interesting to see how each has solved the problems that we had to deal with in Dynamics in different ways.

What is clear is that content management systems are a critical part of what has been called "Web 2.0" – the next generation of the internet – and the thing that makes them really interesting to me is how they provide the one of the core enabling technologies for social media/networking.

The real value in them will come from leveraging the social media component to engage customers in more mutualistic relationships.

What started out as a project to establish a web presence for my family very quickly turned into a project about researching content management systems. All of this coincided with my departure from Earthlink and I decided that this would be a very worthwhile exercise for a number of other reasons.

I’m going to be posting some information on my Joomla findings in a day or two, but I have been very quiet for a while and I wanted to give you a heads up on why I moved to WordPress first.

One of the things I have found about content management systems is how simple it is to backup and recreate the site and copy data around. The fact that everything lives in a database and the fact that the database is easily accessible from SQL means that you can get at the content and move it between your web hosting provider and your internal servers very easily.

The tool that I was using for The Software Gorilla before this was not easy to work with, there was no extensibility in it, and the data was not accessible. It had to go.

During my investigation of other content management systems, I found that each of them had components that helped with writing a blog, but nothing did the job just the way I wanted it. Although I have standardized on one of the content management systems for three other web-sites, I wanted something that could specifically handle blogs.

I had heard a lot of good about WordPress, especially as far as its extensibility is concerned. I set off on a research expedition travelling to a number of web sites that are WordPress based.

WordPress is a content management system specifically designed around blogs. It is ideal for publishing your ideas, getting feedback, having discussions and managing… well… the content of your blog. It provides great stats and it has numerous plugins that help you to extend it. For example, if you want to have a CAPTCHA to block spam responses, there are plugins for that.

It has extensive sets of themes and looks really good when it is set up properly. I’m still experimenting with my theme and I will probably end up building my own theme eventually.

The thing I like most about WordPress is that allows me to focus on writing the stuff that you are reading rather than worrying about the administration and layout of the blog.

The thing that really made me sit up and take notice is that companies like the New York Times, Yahoo and People magazine are all making use of this piece of software to run their blogs. That probably means I can run mine on it pretty safely.

As far as set up is concerned, it is really easy to get going with it and if you would prefer to, you can have WordPress host your blog for you at WordPress.com.

The switchover took me a little while because I needed to get my content from my old system and that was pretty much a manual process.

So far so good. I’m fairly satisfied with the switch and I hope you like it too. Let me know what you think.

A number of people have pitched Drupal to me as a competitor to Joomla. One person wrote:

“When we surveyed content management systems …, Joomla was one of the ones we looked at, but on balance Drupal won out. I recently converted my … site to Drupal and brought up two other sites … on the same code base, but with very different appearance and different features on each. I am very impressed.”

I have spent some time evaluating both of these content management systems and while I have chosen to go with Joomla myself, Drupal could probably have done the job I wanted to get done. My initial post was in no way meant to imply that Drupal was not equaly as capable. There were a couple of things that swayed my vote to Joomla.

1. By the time I looked into Drupal, I already understood how Joomla worked. The argument that Drupal is easier to use therefore did not carry the water for me that it would for others and I felt like Joomla’s flexibility was probably better than Drupal’s provided I was willing to make the investment;
2. I am not scared of getting my hands dirty with PHP, MySQL, CSS and XHTML. That means that if I find an obstacle with Joomla, I have the flexibility to get into it with these technologies if I need to; and
3. I like what Joomla has done to address and caution against security issues within Joomla itself. Security is a very real consideration for any web-site and I think the Joomla team understand this. They may not have all the answers but they definitely understand the issues. You should at least look at the Joomla security site and their security forum before you implement a site using Joomla.

In fact, it is the latter point that made me realize I needed to take down my family site while I work on making sure that I have dealt with any potential security threats. It will be back up in a couple of weeks. 

In a discussion on the issue, someone I was talking to made the statement that they did not want a content management system that required a database because of the administration issues associated with it. To me, that argument does not make any sense because if you go with static HTML instead, you still have the complexity of managing the content and determining what the broken links are. With a good content management system, that process can be easily automated. So although you may not have the expense of the database maintenance, you do have the expense of the static HTML management. Most of the maintenance stuff around my 4 Joomla installations is all automated anyway and I simply check the e-mail that I get on a nightly basis to verify that the backup verification process worked. Moreover, there is so much functionality that you simply get for free that I would hate to have to write manually.

Finally, a gentleman by the name of Jeff Pilant pointed me at a web site that is absolutely invaluable on the security side of things. The site calls itself “Common Weakness Enumeration – A Community-Developed Dictionary of Software Weakness Types” and it enumerates 25 of the most dangerous mistakes that developers make that can create serious security threats in their code. This is a highly recommended read. The information is also available in PDF form and although a lot of this information is available in a number of the security books that are already out there, this is a very valuable and concise reminder.

While I can and have developed web applications, it’s not my favorite kind of development. Actually, anything that involves significant artistry is something I have a hard time doing. I am a software engineer first and foremost. So I was looking for something that would cut corners. I wanted to be able to do what I do with my blog, but on a bigger scale.

All of my web-hosting is handled by GoDaddy and I was looking through the free applications that they make available to all of their web hosting clients. Joomla! happened to be listed and I decided to do some research. What I found sounded very interesting so I had GoDaddy install Joomla on my hosting account and I experimented with it and I was very impressed with what I found.

The first thing that struck me about Joomla is that once the initial setup is done, your focus is on content. It’s not about figuring out what goes where and how to manage your site. Joomla stores its content in a MySQL database and simply applies templates to the data retrieved from the database. A lot of the work around an on-line store is taken care of for you by Joomla. Again, you can focus on the real work – the content. 

Joomla is a little confusing to get the hang of initially, but I found that working through a book on the subject made it very simple and the power that it provides is very impressive. I spent several hours working with Joomla in the evenings during the course of the last week and by the end of the week I had substantially set up 4 new web-sites. All are now ready to be used for their intended purposes and they even have the preliminary content I need them to contain. 

Joomla’s real advantage, though, lies in its extensibility. It has a number of mechanisms for extending the basic tool and although this requires some html, css and php knowledge, the mechanism is there.

I’m just starting with this tool so this is a very early comment on it, but I am very impressed with what I have seen so far. I’ll keep you posted.