A Package Deal?

One of the popular trends today is the use of pre-packaged systems. For many individuals, these come in the form of the ever-popular Blog. However, for community development on the internet, the package is known as a Content Management System (CMS).

Unlike a Blog, which is intended to be updated and maintained by a single person and tends to have a very limited feature set, a good CMS is designed around input and feedback from a community of users and typically has an expandable set of features. Now, as with any other package deal, there are advantages and disadvantages of using a CMS.

CMS packages can be really useful because they take care of the bulk of the web site code for you in some programming or scripting language like PHP, ASP or ColdFusion. Most CMS packages are based around a "news" module, where allowed users can post stories or announcements, and then have other modules (for major items) and blocks (for minor items) to compliment that news. Most good CMS packages also support additional modules and blocks that can be developed either by the main CMS developer or third party developers. Most CMS packages try to offer as many web-based customizations as possible in order to help you create the site you desire.

The greatest feature of a CMS is that it will provide a pre-made web interface for adding, editing and updating information on your website. Some will even provide nice buttons and programs that properly format "news" so that the writer doesn't even need to know any HTML. And as webmasters, we all know that helps make our job easier if we can show someone else how to handle updates easily.

However, even though most CMS packages try to allow for customization, it is often difficult to achieve the look you'd like without knowing some of the code that the CMS is written in. If you don't know it, then you may have to settle for a variation of the main template of the CMS. Often, this is undesirable, as we don't want our site to look "just like everyone else's". Under this same pitfall of not knowing the code, you may also not be able to provide some features for your site unless someone else has already written them. For church websites, a common desired module that can be hard to find for most CMSs is a bible module. So you'd either have to find someone to do it for you, or just wait until someone else finally does it.

One other drawback of a CMS is that even with coding expertise, it can take a long time to configure many of the settings of the CMS to fit what you need to do. For many church websites, this involves "hiding" many of the features you don't plan to use and adding third party modules and blocks that may not go smoothly.

Even though there are some drawbacks to CMS packages, they are often a great building block for a church website. If you're interested in using a CMS, check out Kombiz or CMSWatch and try to find a CMS in a language you know or want to learn (or at least one that has high praises from non-programmers if you're not interested in learning a language). For each CMS, you should be able to find it's niche on the web for help as you need it. Try some of them out...they might be just what you were looking for!