A CMS is the backend of your website. It lets you add new content, moderate comments and trackbacks, rearrange pages, etc. Often, it lets you do this with very little to no knowledge of html or css. It is an administration method that doesn't rely on hand coding and FTP transfers. Nice, eh?

Choosing a CMS

I'm not going to get into which CMS is right for your business. That is a rather complex evaluation and is a series of articles in and of itself. This is about getting your feet wet and installing and building an experimental website. For our purposes, which CMS you choose is based on your technical abilities and your desire to tinker.

Never Heard of a CMS or Little to No Knowledge of HTML or Curious, but don't want to spend more than 1 hour

Try Wordpress.

Used WordPress Before or Some Knowledge of HTML or Willing to Spend a Few Hours Experimenting

Try Joomla or EZPublish.

Used One of the Previous Systems or Some Knowledge of HTML and PHP or Willing to Spend 8+ Hours Experimenting

Try Drupal.

So what's the point of picking a CMS now?

For our purposes, you are picking something that you will install and run locally. It will never see the light of day unless you upload it to a real host or change your machine's web server settings, which I don't recommend. Shared hosts are generally more secure and have better up time than you would hosting your own site and the price is about the same.

This is what's known as a localhost. It's a real web server that is only visible on your local machine. You build and test everything locally and then you upload it and make it available for the world to see.

Why do this? Well, ask yourself if your readers will like seeing all the “Under Construction” notices, error messages, and constantly changing layout. (Hint: The answer to this is a resounding no.) Also, it's a non-threatening way to experiment.

It doesn't matter if you blow up the web page (as long as smoke isn't coming out of your computer, but that's a separate issue) because no one will see it but you.

How do I create a localhost?

By far the simplest method is BitNami. Simply choose which system you want to install and download and install the native stack. Follow the Readme instructions for your operating system to run it.

BitNami is cheating compared to the old install MAMP (Mac), WAMP (Windows) or XAMPP (Linux and Windows). Download the CMS from its website and install it into the htdocs folder. Then configure the file permissions and set up the database and run through the CMS's setup process. Later, especially if you have a host that doesn't use Fantastico or some similar system to install common CMSs, you may want to try doing your own install with a clean MAMP or XAMPP and the downloaded application. But for now, stick with the quick and relatively fool proof BitNami method.

The price for both the BitNami and the MAMP/XAMPP methods is the same...$0. In other words, it costs you nothing but some time to experiment and set things up the way you like them before you push your site out to the world.

What about ________?

For your first experiment, I recommend sticking with one of the systems offered prepackaged by BitNami. Later on, you may want to explore a little more. I'm mostly a PHP person, so the systems that I'm most familiar with are PHP-based. I've tried others. Below are a few that I've tried and run long enough to say they work in some situations.

• XOOPS (PHP)

• CMS Made Simple (PHP)

• Plone (Python)

• Django (Python)

• Movable Type (Perl)

XOOPS is what I almost went with for this site. It's nice, very nice, but it lacked a few features that I felt I would need in the future and I didn't see anyone in the developer channels discussing adding them.

In all honesty, there is little difference between what you can do with CMS Made Simple and what you can do with WordPress, but sometimes you don't want a blog. You don't have to have a blog with WordPress, but it's name is almost synonymous with blogging. If that bothers you, SimpleCMS may be something you want to look into.

Plone and Django were both run in test versions for clients. I really don't know enough Python to be able to delve into their inner workings, so I didn't try. The administration interfaces were clean and the learning curve on Django was much lower than I expected it to be. That's about all the insight I can offer on them, other than hire a Python developer.

I ran my personal blogs on Movable Type for about three months before I moved it back to WordPress. It's nice software, but the moment I decided to start consolidating, and in one case selling, my blog content, I no longer had any need for it. I found WordPress easier to use both from the administration aspect and from a coding one. (Remember that warning at the top. This is me. I want to at least be able to skim the code and know if it makes sense or not.)

What do you use?

For this site, I use Drupal. It has a higher learning curve than some of the other choices, but it offers some functionality that wasn't readily available on the others, it has an active community, and it's development cycle means I won't be upgrading my system every other month. (The constant upgrades was my major gripe with a self-hosted WordPress and what eventually pushed me towards using Wordpress.com for a time.)