Introduction to Content Management

Content Management Systems

According to Wikipedia, a Content Management System (CMS) is

a computer software system for organizing and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content. A content management system is frequently a web application used for managing websites and web content, though in many cases, content management systems require special client software for editing and constructing articles. The market for content management systems remains fragmented, with many open-source and proprietary solutions available.

At the very least, a CMS enables multiple authors to submit content with revision-tracking and editorial workflow. It may provide content-creation tools, e.g. a rich text editor or translation support.

Many CMS products, most famously Lotus Notes, build on the basic content-management features to create "groupware", or software that facilitates on-line collaboration and virtual communities. These additional features typically include:

• Discussion forum
• Calendar
• To-do list
• Polls for soliciting opinions
• Shared photographs
• Shared files/documents
• Shared web links
• Simple ad-hoc databases for tabular data

These basic features are enough to bring together many thousands of virtual communities with members around the world.

Drupal

The Free State Project has selected the CMS Drupal. In the CMS universe, Drupal can be described as

• Open Source
• Based on PHP and MySQL
• Relatively new, so that it is both more modern and a bit less widely used than other products.

Drupal's features cover all the usual CMS and groupware functions listed above, and many more. Besides the official Drupal modules, there are many "contributed" modules from the wider Drupal community. These range from the whimsical Pirate module (for transforming a site's text on Talk Like a Pirate Day) to the powerful Organic Groups.

Though Drupal is one of the more popular open-source CMS products, and spreading rapidly, its basic features are not unique. The FSP chose Drupal from the others for two main reasons:

• Drupal is elegantly architected and relatively easy to customize and extend
• Drupal is the CMS platform used by CivicSpace.

You can learn about Drupal via their collection of Handbooks, one of the paperback manuals below, or on-line articles like:

• Drupal reviewed on Newsforge.
• IBM developerWorks, Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site, Part 5: Getting started with Drupal

CivicSpace / CiviCRM

Drupal is a CMS for virtual communities, and CivicSpace builds on that platform to power virtual movements. From the CivicSpace Wikipedia entry:

CivicSpace, formerly known as Deanspace and Hack4Dean, is a content management system. As implied by its previous names, it was used to power websites supporting the 2004 presidential campaign of Howard Dean. The distribution of the open source content management system based on Drupal focused on political websites. It includes added functionality used for political and other organizing.

The Free State Project is all about moving, so CivicSpace is clearly the right tool for us.