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5 reasons CMS based websites are the best choice

Votes: 1124

This list came to me in a divine moment of 1/2 sleep and 1/2 awake, go figure.

  1. RSS / Livebookmarks / Podcasting

    • In a traditional filesystem you'd have to update these files by hand, and believe me you can easily forget, and besides who wants to update 2 3 or 4 files everytime you update a page or make a new page for your website.
    • In a CMS based web application tasks like this are automated, "set it and forget it".

  2. Index pages and other aggrigation.

    • Who wants to keep 2 or 3 files index pages straight, just setup some rules and bam, it just works.
    • In a flat file system how many edit might be needed for adding a single page?
      1. Add the page
      2. Add the fact that you added it, to your home page
      3. Add it to your rss feed
      4. add it to your Google Sitemap XML document
      5. Add it to any category pages
      6. Add it to a news section
    • Wow almost 6 edits, (maybe 5) what a waste of time.

  3. Commenting

    • No brainer here, can you do commenting on a static html website?
    • CMS solutions help with adding a "community" sense to your website,the web can be more than static documents, quite thinking of the web as carbon copy of your printed material, it can be better, social, and interesting.

  4. Templating

    • Want to change that design your 10 year old nephew/neice made for you? Even if he/she used good CSS and xhtml  mark-up it can still be hard if you want to add whole new features or sections, say advertisements or other  "included" content.
    • With a CMS solutions it's quite easy to have multimpletemplates for your content, sotring all your data in a MySQL DB is the pinacle of seperation of content and presentation, albiet a bit convoluded at times, but they'll have to pry my database content from my cold dead hands if they want it in flat files.

  5. Options

    • There are many great CMS solutions avaliable.
      • MODx - My personal favorite, it's more of a framework allowing for rapids application development, heck you can even "bake" your site to flat files (if you do God have mercy).
      • Drupal - It's al lthe rage for features and support, but it can be slow, and has some bloat, but the new 5.0 soom to be an improvement.
      • Typo3 - I found it confusing, but it seems powerful
      • WordPress - The "bloggers" tool of choice, hence it is great for blogging, but not much else.
      • Mambo/Joomla - I also found these confusing but again great support and community.
      • There are plenty more to try for free at opensourcecms.com
    • Or you could roll your own.