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ARGOMENTI
Definizione generale del termine CMS.
Come lavora un CMS.
Cosa è necessario per iniziare.
Cosa bisogna sapere e quali esperienza sono necessarie.
Su quali campi di conoscenza.
Quali sono i vantaggi.
Cosa è un CMS
per definizione, un sistema di gestione dei
contenuti (in inglese, Content Management System - CMS) è un sistema
software per la creazione, la modificazione, l'archiviazione e la
rimozione di risorse informative da un sistema di classificazione
ben organizzato. Questo significa includere attrezzi per pubblicare,
gestire formati di testo, revisionare, controllare, indicizzare,
cercaree recuperare dati.
(sorgente: Webbook2Ed/glossary.htm)
Un CMS è usato per gestire il contenuto di un sito web.
Usualmente esso è composto da due elementi:
- l'applicazione di gestione dei contenuti (CMA - content management application) e
- l'applicazione di distribuzione dei contenuti (CDA - content delivery application)
Il CMA permette all'autore di gestire con facilità la creazione, modificazione, rimozione dei contenuti di un sito Web senza
che conosca necessariamente l'HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), formato
tipico dei contenuti distribuiti attraverso il Web.
Queste operazioni,
sono rese possibili dall'esistenza di interfacce amichevoli via web che
non richiedono l'esperienza di un webmaster per essere gestite, bastando
le semplici competenze necessarie ad usare un Word Processor.
Il CDA utilizza le informazioni introdotte per compilare e mantenere costantemente aggiornato il sito Web.
In che modo funziona un CMS?
Un Sistema di Gestione Contenuti (Content Management System),
lavora archiviando immagini e testi in un database. Quando una pagina
web viene richiesta da un utente il sistema CMS accede al database e
prepara la pagina. Dato che i dati sono separati dal codice che li
visualizza, si può rappresentare graficamente la pagina con maggiore
libertà e duttilità e si può cambiare l'aspetto grafico della
presentazione senza che questo modifichi i dati presentati, inoltre i
contenuti del database possono essere modificati attraverso interfacce
sul web chenon richiedono particolari conoscenze di HTML o FTP.
Perchè
un sistema di gestione dinamica dei contenuti possa funzionare, è
indispensabile che sul server che ospita il sito sia installato
software come asp, php o cgi e che il software di gestione dei dati sia
adatto ad usare le risorse offerte da queste tecnologie.
Le
funzionalità di un sistema CMS variano ma la maggioranza di essi
include la capacità di pubblicazione di contenuti, gestione dei formati
di testo, revisione e controllo, indicizzazione e ricerca direttamente
basata sul Web e gestita tramite un semplice browser (fonte:
www.cesa8.k12.wi.us/media/digital_dictionary.htm).
Perché usare un CMS
In today's world of e-Businesses, content flow is almost as crucial as
cash flow. If an enterprise cannot refresh the information about its
product on a continuous basis then it will not be able to fulfill the
today's Internet based expectations. (source: erptoday.com)
Organisation's use web Content Management Systems to integrate their
web presence with the rest of their operations. They use them to ensure
content is up to date, refreshed and relevant. These systems also allow
businesses to extract more value from the web channel and gain greater
return on web marketing and web communication endeavours.
What are the advantages
In any Content management system, there are many basic features which
should be present so that the system works efficiently and saves time
and money. The CMS database or the central repository for corporate
content must be accessible to a wide range of technical and
non-technical individuals.
CMS interface must be easy to use, and its architecture must fit within
the framework defined by the IT organization. It should be menu driven
so that the pages can be added and linked easily. Creating, designing
and deploying the web content should be automated according to the need
of the organization. It should reduce the time programmers have to
spend on building custom forms for content management. The programmer
can spend that time on the front-end of the web site.
· The user interface design
of CMS should be changed using templates. Different templates for
different level of users should be present.
· The CMS Management Tool
should be present which is used to manage groups, users and rights from
a central point. There should be a facility to import groups and users
in the domains like Windows or Unix.
· It should be powered by the
latest database and internet technologies and should be used in any
operating system on any computer platform.
· CMS should facilitate
better content security. It should control who is allowed to publish to
the website, and who is allowed to see what content.
· It should eliminate the
constant and large volume of updates by redistributing the publishing
work among the content authors, who can now publish and update their
own content using easy-to-use, browser-based tools.
· It should reduce Web site
maintenance time and costs. Most of the maintenance operations should
be automatic.
· For the content authors,
the facilities like, selecting different types of content from the
inbuilt content library, cut & paste from other applications, set
publication dates and times for finished pages in advance and have them
publish automatically and easy, automatic page indexing and linking
should be present.
· Content management system
should provide tools for adding and managing content for administrators
including Content Owners, Content Editors, Page Owners and Site
Administrator.
· The system should be able
to scale in terms of performance, integration with other applications
and the addition of custom features.
· The system should provide
multi user options for controlling the user privileges at multiple
levels. The security keys should be provided to restrict the users to
work according to their access rights.
· The database model should
not be rigid but it should be able to analyze the database structure
and build the forms for database tables accordingly.
(source: erptoday.com)
Are there any disadvantages?
Of course, every web design company that owns or resells a CMS system
will tout its numerous advantages but most will fail to inform their
customers of the disadvantages that CMS or content management systems
have.
There are 2 types of content management systems available. Dynamic
websites allow users to instantaneously update web content and batch
publishing where web content is updated on the user's local computer
and the website is then updated at a nominated time, usually late at
night. For the purpose of this article, the disadvantages of dynamic
website content management systems will be discussed.
How does a Content Management System work?
A Content Management System works by storing pictures and text into a
database. When a webpage is requested, the CMS system accesses the
database and renders the webpage. Because the data is separated from
the code, changes to the data can be made using a web interface that
requires no knowledge of HTML or ftp.
For a content management system to work, software like asp, php or cgi
must be installed on the server and the software written to fit the
configuration of the server.
Content Management systems are resource hungry
The disadvantage of dynamic content management systems is that they are
resource hungry. The servers they run on need to be maintained by
technicians, and content management requires more memory, CPU power and
software maintenance. Small setting changes in the server can cause the
entire content management system to fail and as a consequence the
website will not be viewable or return errors.
Badly coded CMS, or CMS systems that have been developed on Access
instead of SQL will slow down with increasing numbers of users. Even
well coded dynamic websites will take up more server cpu and memory
than static HTML websites.
Content Management hosting is expensive
If you want reliable hosting for a content management system, then
expect to pay money to get it. Although, many kiddy programmers do
start their own web hosting business by reselling hosting or buying a
server and the price of asp, php, asp.net hosting can start as low as
U.S. $2.95 per month, it is simply delusional to believe that 24/7
managed shared hosting can be viable at these prices.
Without technical support, proper management of shared hosting
resources and server maintenance, you can expect to have problems. The
added complication of resource hungry content management systems and
the need to have qualified technicians maintain and upgrade software
and hardware, means that hosting for content management systems is
expensive.
Content Management systems need to be upgraded to changes in software
Like cars, content management systems depreciate. There is no
guarantees that the content management system purchased today will work
in 5 or 10 years time without a developer spending time on upgrades to
make it compatible to software changes. New versions of Windows, server
software and office software will impact on the functionality of the
content manaement system.
Many CMS systems do not index properly on search engines
The benefit of publishing a website is to get the added benefit of
search engine visibility but unfortunately a major disadvantage of many
content management systems is that they do not index properly on search
engines. Read Dynamic webpages that are indexed by Google for more
information
Conclusion
If you are updating your website regularly; on a daily or weekly basis,
then renting or buying a content management system is a logical choice.
(Ensure that you do some reallocation of staff duties to allow time for
staff to update the website because although it may only take a couple
of minutes to publish a webpage, someone still has to write, proof
read, type set and reduce the size of images and that takes time.
Failure to reallocate human resources will often mean that many
companies buy a CMS system but rarely use it)
If you are not going to update your website regularly, then a static
HTML website is easier to maintain and cheaper to host. HTML websites
are not as resource hungry and can be moved relatively easily, if you
want to change hosting companies. It is also easier to find someone
that can program in HTML than it is to find a developer to fix a CMS
system should things go wrong.
If you already have an existing HTML website, make sure you analyse
your statistics before embarking on a content management buying spree.
The URLs of your new pages will have asp, aspx, php or cgi extensions
and will not have htm or html extensions and this will mean that unless
you are prepared to program redirects (which search engines don't like)
visitors coming from search engines will get the dreaded Page Not Found
and you may lose a potential customer. (source:
passioncomputing.com.au)
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