In fact, all a Web site developer should (Domain and web hosting)
In fact, all a Web site developer should ever have to do is maintain the site design itself (update some HTML, change a background color, fix a bug in the PHP code, for example). The content should be completely separate from the design of the site, and should be maintained by other people. Because the content is separate from the design, those content people don t have to know anything about Web site design! But once you have your content separated, you need to figure out how to manage it. Management Assuming you have a lot of content, entering it into your site will most likely take a lot of work. What you need to do is come up with a way to organize it, categorize it, and push the content to your Web site. You will need a number of people, each assigned a certain role, working together to create the content and mold it into the appropriate form for presentation on the Web site. Of course, you want this process to be efficient, and you definitely need to have the appropriate tools to do the job. System Chapter 10 showed you how to create your own databases and tables and how to create Web pages used to insert, delete, update, and retrieve the information in those tables. In Chapter 12, you learned how to authenticate and recognize your users by making them log in to your Web site. Armed with this knowledge, you could create a system of Web pages designed to allow users to create new content (authors), edit that content (editors), and publish it. By assigning users to certain roles, you can manage who has access to certain functions within the site. Putting It All Together So, it seems that you need a group of Web site pages and tables, and an organized set of rules, that will give you the means to gather information, format it, and present it to the world for its enjoyment. In other words, you need a system in place to allow you to manage your Web site content (separately from the site design). You need a Content Management System (or CMS, as we ll refer to it from now on). There are many degrees of content management. On some sites, this might simply refer to a message board, where users sign up to post messages to each other about their favorite color of lint. Another site might have reporters in the field writing news stories and sending them in to be published online. Yet another site might not only allow users to update content, but will allow administrators to change the layout of the site, including colors and images. As you have no doubt figured out, the term CMS refers not only to the application used to enter content, but to the people responsible for entering content, and to the rules they must follow. Without proper rules, and without the people to make it happen, no CMS application in the world is going to help you. It s up to you to find the people. We ll help you establish the rules. Are you ready? Good, let s get started. The CMS application you are going to build will allow registered users to post articles. Those articles will be labeled pending until a user with the proper permissions publishes the article. Once it s published, it will show up as the newest article on the home page. Unregistered users will be able to read articles but will not be able to post new ones. 416 Chapter 13
In case you need quality webspace to host and run your web applications, try our personal web hosting services.