Web Content Management Systems

Content management systems are more popular these days, even those with little knowledge about Internet & Web making can create fully-fledged websites with the help of content management systems. This article intends to introduce some of the pioneer Open Source web content management systems.

Wikipedia defines Web CMS systems as follows.

web-content-management system (WCMS or Web CMS) is content management system (CMS) software, usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions.

There are a lot of popular Content Management Systems available, many of them are free and open source. Content management systems like Wordpress, Django, Drupal, etc are a few best options among them. Let's see some of them.

Drupal

Drupal is one of the most popular Open Source Content management Systems, it is equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites. Drupal is developed using PHP, the standard release of Drupal (Drupal core), contains basic features common to most CMSs. These include the ability to create a classic brouchureware website or a community oriented interactive website.It also boasts of a variety of features and plugins. One of the main advantage of using Drupal is its community support, Drupal has a strong community driven by developers, contributers, users, fans, etc.

You can downlaod Drupal from http://drupal.org/

Wordpress

Wordpress is another popular Open Source Content manage system, it is the official successor of b2\cafelog which was developed by Michel Valdrighi. Even though wordpress is a complete content management system, it is most popular among its users for its powerful blogging capabilities and ease of use. Like most of the other popular CMSs it also features a rich plugin based architecture and theme support along with its legendary widget system. Since Wordpress is a community oriented open source software, you will have a great support from the community with each and everything from installation to customisation.

Learn more about Wordpress from http://wordpress.org/

Joomla

Another Top of the breed Content Management System. Like other content management systems, Joomla also boasts of a rich architecture with plug-in and theme support. The official site says that - "Joomla makes creating and maintaining Web sites easy for everyone, from total beginners setting up their first site to IT professionals managing enterprise installations." The Joomla has a strong community of developers, contributors and others willing to help anyone who is interested in Joomla.


You can Get your copy of Joomla and learn more about it from http://www.joomla.org/

TYPO3

It is an open-source, enterprise-level content management system focused on providing companies a solution for websites and their intranet. While most of the content management systems try to be simple and basic, TYPO3 comes with a set of complex and powerful features to help you achieve complicated tasks and ability to integrate with other applications. It is recommended for intermediate to advanced users.

Read more and download typo3 from http://typo3.com/

Railfrog

It is a user-friendly, open source website deployment and content management system, producing well structured and standards-compliant pages with Web 2.0 goodness. Railfrog makes it easy for developers, designers, webmasters, or just about anyone else to deploy and manage a website. One of the main features of Railfrog is it is developed on top of the Ruby on Rails web application framework (the same technology behind twitter and basecamp).

Download and Learn more from http://railfrog.com/

Open CMS

Open CMS is another open source CMS based on Java and XML technology. The fully browser based user interface features configurable editors for structured content. Alternatively, content can be created using an integrated wysiwyg editor similar to well known office applications. A sophisticated template-engine enforces a site-wide corporate layout and W3C standard compliance for all content. There are plenty of enterprise standard features in Open CMS, which makes it one of the perfect candidate for enterprise customers, the same time Open CMS keeps the simplicity to attract the ordinary customers too.

Get your copy of Open CMS from http://www.opencms.org

PostNuke

It is another Open Source Content management system, that helps us to creates an impressive, dynamic web site and provides the webmaster with a site they can administer with a minimal amount of HTML knowledge through a web browser. PostNuke's functionality can be increased by installing modules, blocks and themes. For example, you can add a forum, a gallery and contact form. You can also change how your entire site looks by changing themes. All of this can be done with just a few clicks in the administration panel saving you hours of time, both in the initial creation of the website and in its day to day maintenance.

You can read more information and download Post nuke from http://www.postnuke.com/

So now you know a few Free-to-use Content Management Systems, why not try and make a website or blog for yourself ?? Watch out for more useful articles :)

CVS : Concurrent Versions System

I started learning some courses using MIT Open CourseWare, some of the courses need to have softwares like Eclipse,CVS etc. Let's see how to install a CVS Server in your Ubuntu Machine.

Concurrent Versions System (CVS), is a free software revision control system. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers to collaborate.

Install and Configure CVS Server

You can install CVS files by typing sudo apt-get install cvs in your terminal.

Then we need to install the CVS server by entering sudo apt-get install cvsd in your terminal.



Type in “/cvsrepo” when the cvsd prompts to enter a Repository.
(make sure the directory "cvsrepo" exists, if not create a directory with the command sudo mkdir /cvsrepo)

Now change the directories permissions using the command sudo chown -R cvsd:cvsd /cvsrepo

once the installation is completed, goto /var/lib/cvsd by typing cd /var/lib/cvsd in your terminal.

You can use sudo cvsd-buildroot /var/lib/cvsd to create a cvs build root directory.

Now initialize the cvs repository using the command sudo cvs -d /var/lib/cvsd/cvsrepo init

Creating a CVS user Account



sudo cvsd-passwd /var/lib/cvsd/cvsrepo +username can be used to create a new cvs account.

NB replace username with your desired user name (for example John).

Test your CVS Repository

cvs -d :pserver:testusername@localhost:/cvsrepo login

cvs -d :pserver:testusername@localhost:/cvsrepo checkout

Now everything is set and your cvs server is ready to fly. Experiment with it.

Saving the Planet : An Open Source Way!

Today is Earth Day, (Earth day ,celebrated April 22, is a day designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's environment). If we look at a broader scale of the global movement, we can see that the world is progressing towards a better position.Science and Technology helped us (and still helping us) improve a lot, but when we look at the nature and the destruction caused to it by humans, it is catastrophic. Several species of animals, plants, etc are already disappeared forever from our planet. We all know that there are a lot of people working to reverse these bad effects, but still things are not going very well.

I was thinking, if Open Source methodologies and members of the community can do something about it. So I googled about it a little and found an interesting movement called Cquestrate.

Cquestrate

This project is based on an idea.

The idea works like this:

• First, you heat limestone to a very high temperature, until it breaks down into lime and carbon dioxide.
• Then you put the lime into the sea, where it reacts with carbon dioxide dissolved in the seawater.

The important point is that when you put lime into seawater it absorbs almost twice as much carbon dioxide as is produced by the breaking down of the limestone in the first place.

This has the effect of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It also helps to prevent ocean acidification, another problem caused by the increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

If done on a large enough scale it would be possible to reduce carbon dioxide levels back to what they were before the Industrial Revolution.

Read more on the idea from http://www.cquestrate.com/the-idea

How you can get Involved ?

Visit http://www.cquestrate.com/get-involved and get yourself informed on how you can participate on this project. There are number of ways you might be able to help our planet, tryout and be a part of this movement.

Also there are so many other things to save our planet. Like reducing the use of plastics, reusing plastic and computers, spreading awareness, etc..

Let's all work together to make our world a better place to live.