Questions about Content Management Systems

I need some insight on what exactly a CMS is used for. First let me tell you my situation, so you can better judge if a CMS would suit my needs.

I want to make a website with tutorials. The homepage would link to tutorial categories. Each category would have its own page with the previews of the each tutorial in that section. Then each tutorial would have its own individual page.

Now my question is, would I have to manually create an html file for each tutorial page or could I get a CMS to do that for me after feeding it the content (text/images)?

If I should use a CMS for this purpose, can I install and use one while building my site offline, or would I have to pay for a web server and install it on there just to experiment with it?

Thanks in advice for any help.

I take it no one has a clue as to what I'm talking about lol

Well I do have a small amount of experience with them. I used a CMS years back called Dragonfly. Initially I was not the one to set it up, but I suggest maybe seeing if you can in touch with Solaris via a PM. He may have some insight on what it is you are trying to do.

I've actually come a long way since my original post. I now know what a CMS is and how it's used.

At the moment I've decided to try Wordpress. This is proving to be a bit of a headache though because I'm not designing a blog, I just need some of the components that WP possesses (categories, posts).

After trying to implement WP into my current site, I came to the conclusion that I have to start from scratch and completely redesign the site around the framework of WP. That's where I'm at right now.

I don't think Wordpress is that bad of a choice for what you are trying to make. It is truly a fully-functional CMS that has a good community (ergo tons of plugins), concise documentation, and versatility. In fact, there was talks to build a Void portal powered by Wordpress a while back.

You are correct that you will need to make some modifications as you shouldn't expect it to suit your needs straight out of the box, but no CMS does.

You could also take a look at ExpressionEngine, MovableType for a more Wordpress-y style or more traditional CMS like Drupal or Joomla as other options.

If you want more control you can use web frameworks (Symfony, Rails, Django) to do what you want, but more work is needed. Usually they are used for more complex sites. Personally I'm a fan of Django for its rapid web development.

Thanks to both of you for your insight. I think I'm good to go on CMSes, well Wordpress at least. I started rebuilding my site through WP and it is much easier as far as managing content goes (needless to say). What I don't like is that you have to pay to customize the stylesheet or even add your own, and you can only use the 107 themes they provide, rather than the thousands that people have created.

The site I'm building now is through WP, as I said above. Previously I tried using a free web host called 000webhost and installing/utilizing WP through their host. I managed to install WP and make it to the dashboard, but making new pages didn't actually make new pages, they led to an error page.

I had already set up the mySQL database and alter the wp-config.php file, but I'm not sure if it was connected to the WP properly or not. Any thoughts on this?

Yea, because of limitations on wordpress.com, installing WP on a dedicated host would be better. I would suggest not using free hosting sites as I've found them to be unstable and have poor service (service is free so why should they care? kind of mindset).

Although before taking the plunge and buying hosting right away take the time to learn all that WP has to offer. Look into AMP packages (WAMP if you use windows) which install Apache2, MySQL, and PHP so you can have an install of wordpress powered by a local db on your computer. This is common practice in the web development industry to have a local copy to work on before pushing changes to a live environment. You are pretty much free to play around and learn w/e without the risk of seriously fucking up a live site.

Creating the mysql db and editing wp-config.php are the right steps. The last step would be going to wp-admin/install.php in your web browser. This will run the install script for wordpress and finalize everything.

I have WAMP installed on my computer now, and installed WP on it. Everything seems to be working fine. Did a few tests to see if the PHP and mySQL were working properly and they passed. Everything I bitched about in the post above is now irrelevant, as I can use any theme I wish and customize it.

Aside from adding all the contents to the pages I created, I would say the site is pretty much completed, as far as setup goes. However, the whole point of all of this is to teach myself web design/development. I feel like this is cheating or taking a shortcut because it's so easy. If nothing else I can add WP to my resume later haha.

WP is definitely a good direction to move in. If you have any questions, I specialize specifically in working with WP as a blogging system and as a CMS. It's very flexible in that it can take just about any form you want it to. EE is also good, but I've found that for someone who may not be as strong in PHP, WP has a bit less of a learning curve.

Designing around WP is a bit of an art. In its simplest form, to put any template into a form usable for WP, you should first go ahead and code the whole thing standalone, just as if you weren't going to use any kind of injectable content. Once you have completely done your layout, then you go in and basically break your layout into 3 sections: header, body, and footer. This is how the templating system is handled in WP. Now the way you distribute your content between the 3 is entirely up to you, but I have found that if you build your normal header section (linking any javascript classes, stylesheets, etc) and "container" divs all in the header template, and then worked your way into the body of your layout using the body template, and then closed all the open divs, etc in your footer template, that seems to be the simplest method of conversion.

If you're looking to start somewhere that isn't completely from scratch (although I would highly suggest working from a template that is as empty as possible), you can just find a really minimal wordpress template, and then start incorporating your layout into that. Starting a template from scratch can be a bit mindboggling if you're not used to the way wordpress handles templates and content.

Once you have your wireframe done inside the layout, then you start building your content. Wordpress as a CMS is nifty because you can use either posts as regenerating content (where a specific section of your layout loops new posts that link to articles), or you can use pages, where you query a specific page and load that data into that particular section. It can be very modular, but again that all depends on how you set things up.

The very last thing you can do (and this is optional) is take advantage of the CMS features already built into WP. There are tons and tons of functions that allow you to streamline the actual maintenance process of your site. For instance, when I did my last WP portal, I added edit buttons to each section that loaded a page, and those buttons appeared next to the editable sections when an administrator was logged into the system. Clicking the edit button sent them directly to the WP control panel and right into editing that particular section. And it's all handled by WP.

I understand if this seems a bit over the top, but I highly suggest you just load WP into wamp and tinker away. I learned more by asking questions and then finding answers to them. WP is extremely powerful and can be very fun and rewarding.

Feel free to ask if you need any help. Sorry I didn't notice this thread before.