Build A Web Site On Your Mac. Tips From A to Z.

Continued from Page 1…

Blogging Tools Grow Up
What’s the rage in web pages these days? Blogs. Web logs. Tools to create a site with content that grows daily.

Rapidweaver’s built in blog tools are good for some, though managing hundreds and hundreds of web pages makes the manual process, well, manual.

Manual means painful when the web site grows too large and cumbersome.

Here’s the WikiPedia definition for blog:

“A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog comprises hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files).”

Sounds like a web site with frequently updated content, right? It is. Blogging started out as free in the open source community and has evolved.

In fact, evolution of web log tools has been so rapid that most of us refer to them as content management tools. CMS. Tools that build very complex web sites without all the complexity.

There must be twenty eleven blogging tools available. A blog tool is built in to iWeb. Rapidweaver’s is better. But they’re everywhere. If all you want is a blog, the tools are free, sites are easy, what else do you need?

Go to blogger.com and enjoy life.

Open Source CMS
Back to web sites. The elements of consideration are growing, right? Ease of use. Design. Manage site organizational structure. Add content quickly and easily.

Is there no end in site to the needs of a site? Truly, the beast can have an appetite. Open Source to the rescue.

Assume you want a web site that’s relatively simple to set up, doesn’t cost much, comes with bells and whistles, doesn’t require a double PhD in engineering and art, has built-in designs that can change easily, and can be managed by point and click?

Open Source to the rescue. While there are many, many open source content management systems (we’ve graduated from web site, site management, to blog, to CMS), allow me to focus on two that are popular, mature, and priced right.

Did I mention that they’re free?

WordPress and Mambo/Joomla. Both are mature, stable, simple to set up, and will take your web site to the next level.

Need a simple site? Can do. Need to add pages and more content? Can do. Need a business site? Yep, that, too. Need members, login ability, web-based content updates, instant changes? Yep, yep, yep, and yes.

The difference here is that these CMS applications require the PHP scripting engine language (already on Mac OS X) and the MySQL database (available as a free download for Mac OS X.

Additionally, many hosts now provide PHP access and MySQL databases as part of a web site hosting agreement.

WordPress is the easiest install. Copy files to your host site, use your web browser to install the files in the MySQL database (or, do it all on your Mac), and you’re in business. A web site is born.

Select from dozens of themes (templates) to change the look and feel of your site. It’s all point and click. And free (except for the web site hosting charges).

It’s almost as easy as Rapidweaver and more capable in a number of areas. For example, adding users, changing privileges, developing categories with nested menus, and so on. WordPress is a good start toward true content management.

Mambo and Joomla go one more level by adding more tools to a simple installation, more templates (themes), and the ability to add components and modules.

While the price of WordPress and Mambo and Joomla are exactly the same (as in “beer”), the former is not as capable as the latter two.

Why two? Mambo’s been open source for many years and is a mature product with hundreds of thousands of installations.

Mambo’s main developers left the project and formed Joomla, ostensibly based on the same code. For now, the two are almost identical (I prefer Joomla), but that may change in the future.

Installation is not quite as simple as WordPress as you enter the world of Unix permissions (it’s good to learn; your Mac is using Unix permissions) and that can be maddening until you, well, learn it. Then it’s easy. Just like brain science or rocket surgery.

Mambo and Joomla and WordPress come with template and theme capability to make design a selection process, rather than a building process. You can build your own, but it’s not simple.

Selecting a template or theme is just a matter of finding one you like on the web, uploading to your site, point and click to select. Poof. The site’s look and feel changes.

And there’s more. Click Here for Page 3.