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Of course, hundreds of other specialized CMSs are out there. Before you try to build your own CMS from the ground up, take a look at the other available offerings and see whether you can start by using the work of somebody else.

Drupal

Drupal is one of the most popular multipurpose CMSs out there. Intended for larger sites, it’s more involved than the specialty CMSs — although it can do almost anything.

Figure 3-4 shows a basic site running Drupal.

Figure 3-4: Drupal is intended to support online communities.

Drupal was designed primarily for managing community Web sites. It is commonly used in the following types of sites:

♦ Gaming sites: Many game communities are based around a CMS like Drupal because it allows opportunities for users to share information, opinions, news, and files.

♦ Software sites: A CMS like Drupal is an ideal place to post information about your software, including downloads, documentation, and user support.

♦ Forums: Although you can find many dedicated forum packages, Drupal supports several good forum tools.

♦ Blogging: You can also use Drupal as a news site and a location to post your blog. You can add community features when you want or need them.

Drupal is powerful and extremely popular. However, this power has led to increased complexity. Learning everything you can do with Drupal will take some time and effort.

Building a CMS site with Website Baker

For the rest of this chapter, I take you through the installation and customization of a complete Web site using the Website Baker CMS. This is one of my favorite CMSs for a number of reasons:

♦ It’s easy to understand: Systems like Drupal have gotten so complicated that you often require entire books on how to use them. Website Baker (as you’ll see) is not complicated at all, even for somewhat advanced features.

♦ It’s easy to modify: Website Baker uses a reasonably simple template system that’s primarily XHTML and CSS (with a few PHP functions thrown in). This makes it very easy to adapt pages that were not designed in Website Baker to a CMS format.

♦ It’s easy to teach to clients: When you’re building a commercial site, it’s critical that your customer learns how to manage the site. The easier you can make managing the site for the customer, the easier your job is down the road.

♦ It’s reasonably complete: The basic install of Website Baker is not large, but you can customize your installation with hundreds of modules and templates to get exactly the look and behavior you want.

♦ It’s free and open source: Like almost all the software I recommend, Website Baker is entirely free and open source, even for commercial use.

I focus on Website Baker in the upcoming section, but it’s just an example CMS. Look over this section, but if you want to use a different CMS than Website Baker, by all means do so. You’ll see the overall steps are pretty much the same regardless of the particular package you use.

Installing your CMS

A CMS package typically contains many different kinds of files. Most are primarily PHP programs with HTML/XHTML pages and CSS. Most CMSs also include databases written in MySQL. To install a CMS, you need to download these components and install them on your server.

1. Download the latest version of Website Baker at http://www.websitebaker2.org/en/home.php.

Download the Zip file. (The CMS is all Web code, so it doesn’t matter which operating system you use.)

2. Create a subdirectory on your Web root.

If you use a local server, create a new subdirectory under htdocs (or wherever you save your Web files). If you’re on a remote server, use FTP or the file management tool to create the subdirectory you want the files to go in.

3. Copy all Website Baker files to the new directory.

The Zip file you download from Website Baker contains a wb directory. Copy all files and folders in this directory to your new directory.

4. Navigate to the new directory in your browser.

Be sure you have Apache and MySQL turned on. If you’re on a local machine, be sure to use