The perfect CMS

26 May 2008 - 18:09

The holy grail of web development for me has been to find a system that puts paid to the business of hand coding and uploading individual pages without losing the flexibility and control over search engine optimization (SEO) that hand coding gives you. Content management systems (CMS) have been around a long time, but they always seemed to have a steep learning curve. It was hard to figure out how to make the pages look how I wanted, or incorporate features that were not built into the package. And it seemed impossible, if the aim was to convert an existing site, to keep the page URLs the same as the originals, something that is essential to retain any page rank the pages have already earned. I think I have finally found the holy grail, and it's name is CMS Made Simple.

I have just finished migrating one small site over to CMS Made Simple. It really was simple. You take one of your existing pages, paste it into a new template within the CMS, cut out the content and other page-specific sections and substitute tags which the CMS will replace with the actual content of each page. You also need to create a stylesheet for the template using your old page's existing style sheet. You then go through the site a page at a time, copying and pasting the content of each old page into a new page in the CMS. There is also a section for entering meta tags for each page, such as a description (and keywords, if you still bother with them.)

In practise, it may take a bit longer than the above suggests, because you'll probably want to take advantage of some of the features CMS Made Simple gives you. For example, its menu manager can generate hierarchical menus and other aids to navigation that probably weren't present in the original pages. You'll need to add CSS to style these menus to match the rest of the site.

To keep the same page names as the original static pages, you have to give each page in the CMS an alias of the original page name. You then change a configuration option to add a dummy extension, such as .html, and add a couple of lines to the site .htaccess file to rewrite these virtual URLs so that CMS Made Simple serves up the right pages. When everything is ready, just delete the old static pages and up come the new ones!

CMS Made Simple has powerful tags and modules that make it extremely easy to add functionality to a site. For example, simply by installing a sitemap module, the CMS will automatically create an up to date Google site map whenever anything changes. I hate to think of the time I've spent coding and testing PHP scripts to generate site maps!

As well as system-defined tags, you can have user-defined ones. They are written in PHP, so anything you can do in a hand-coded page can theoretically be incorporated into a CMS Made Simple site. I found it quite easy to incorporate an existing form mail script and guest book so that the converted site retained exactly the same functionality as the original.

The entire conversion task took less than a day, and a lot of that was taken up creating a new CSS-based template for the site because I felt it was time to pension off the table-based original. Now I have a site that is easier to maintain and has better navigation. I could even allow the users to add their own pages, because adding content now is not that much different from using a word processor. You can see the final result at Cumbrians Against Fluoridation.