Forum Moderators: phranque
I will soon be launching a simple content-driven site which is being constructed using Dreamweaver MX. The one thing I would really like to sort out is the ability to easily update its content from anywhere in the world, say at a very basic internet cafe.
My ideal "vision" is thus: I can access content merely by logging in. I would have templates saved online, so that in the end, to add a new page, I just start from a basic template, and fill in the given fields (Title, Section1, Section2, etc), maybe upload a pic or two (a little like attaching one with Hotmail), submit, and that's that!
Plus, simplicity is KEY. This is my first site, and won't involve anything like forums/polls/back-end DBs (at least not yet). I am just desperate to launch it with the above "vision" intact, with as little nonsense as possible. Unix installs, FTP sessions etc... if possible would want to avoid!
Does this sound like a CMS solution all the way? And are there many hosting providers out there that offer quick install support for some major CMS systems on their CPanel? Alas, Westhost isn't one of them :( Thanks in advance!
or a blog or a wiki
One other thing I'm wondering about though: let's say some hacker breaks in and deletes all the content on your website. Now, using the "traditional" approach (i.e. storing HTML pages and templates locally, and then uploading them), you'll have everything you need to restore the front-end content.
But what if you rely on a CMS (which for a start tends to make hacking disasters slightly more likely, right)? I suppose you could store your CMS content and templates locally for backup. But if the hacker is very malicious, then you might have to start completely from scratch with respect to the CMS customization settings. If you've been using this CMS for years, making small changes all along, you could suddenly lose them all? It doesn't seem quite as simple to save these system settings locally.
A good CMS clearly removes hassle from updating content, but just how much would it increase the hassle of recovering from a DoS attack?
I've also realised that if the webhost server crashes, or someone hacks in and deletes everything, all files would be lost. I still haven't come up with a decent solution. Maybe have the PHP send my home computer an email with an attached copy of the new webpage every time I add one via CMS? Dunno...
Another thing - I'm hoping for a CMS setup that once implemented would require a bare minimum of technology to achieve updates. As in, literally an internet connection and that's all - no need for FTP software if I wanted to upload new images for instance. I realize that this uploading issue is a tricky bit. Are there many CMS packages that make for very easy uploading?
Or perhaps there are roundabout ways to achieve a similar feat, like sending an email with an image attachment to your website email and taking it from there?
As for backups, I just pull down all the files from time to time. Not the best backups system, but with a little bit of tar, gzip, crontab, scp and ssh keys I'm planning to put together a very simple offsite backup.
For any other CMS, most of them are just a pile of scripts and a bunch of database entries, so provided you are capable of backing up files on your host, all you have to do is backup the CMS files, get a database dump and back that up.
If you're looking for a lot of bells and whistles or you don't have a lot of programming experience, a custom CMS is not necessarily the approach to take. But if you just need to be able to work with your site in an organized manner from anywhere and have the skills required, this can work very well.
