Hands on: How to roll your own CMS

In my last article, we looked at ways to keep a site up to date, allowing non-technical people to add extra information, without requiring them to learn anything about web design or HTML.

Online editing systems are one option, such as Mozile, but there are still some compromises that have to be made in setting up such a system.

A full-blown CMS (content management system) is another alternative, and we’ll look at some of the best-known open source systems at a later date.

This time, though, I’ll look at the ‘middle’ option, which is a ‘roll your own CMS’.

That might sound a bit complicated, but you can put together a basic system that will fit the needs of many smaller sites remarkably easily.

It may even be easier than downloading, configuring and installing a large CMS system, let alone showing your client (or colleagues) how to use it to update their site.

Of course, the devil’s in the detail, and this sort of thing really works well if there aren’t too many different types of information to add to the website.

Otherwise, you’ll find you need lots of options, making it fiddly for people to use, and making the database that drives the site overly complex.

Rolling your own
For my own site, I decided to keep it simple – and ultimately much more straightforward to keep up to date – by having just three areas: one with information about me, one with articles you can read on the site, and one with links to material elsewhere.

That way, there are only three main types of information that can be added. But that, of course, could make things slightly dull.

So there are a couple of twists as well; for each article or link, there’s information about who it was done for, so the entry for PCW, for example, says (naturally) that it’s the best magazine in the UK.

And each page is designed with two parts: the main text; and a right-hand column that has notes explaining the background to the rest of the page, or provide more useful links.

So, although it might not look like the slickest site, it has a fairly straightforward design, and all the different elements can be updated easily by simply making an entry in the database.

Those who are familiar with Dreamweaver will know that the data entry side is pretty straightforward, to the point where you can just say, ‘Make me a web page that puts an entry in this database.’

A way to update entries is helpful, but that can be fairly easily automated as well, so rather than concentrate on that side of things, I will look at the retrieval and display aspect of the site instead.

Do remember, though, that just as we had to consider security in our look at Mozile, if you’re rolling your own CMS, you need to make sure that any management pages can only be accessed by appropriate people, either by coding them to ask for login details, or using controls such as a .htaccess file on the web server.

An alternative, which may be suitable for some users, is to simply use a Windows or Mac front-end program to the database, such as CocoaMySQL on the Mac.

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