Building your own site using CMS!

There are several ways of building your own site. One way is using an open source web content management systems and open source blogging tools.  Web Content Management Systems (CMS) is a system used to manage the content of a website. It allows several users to publish contents such as images and multimedia resources in a website. These are the list of those tools and CMS that you can use that I've already tried my self. I'm recommending that you try it!

1. Wordpress Blog Tool and Weblog Platform - this is commonly used by bloggers. Wordpress requires you to have a web server that supports PHP and MySQL. I think this is the simplest tool I've ever used . You can download the source from http://wordpress.org/download/. You can download wordpress theme from http://themes.wordpress.net/. Latest Wordpress version: 2.3.1 Requirements:   PHP 4.2 or greater,  MySQL 4.0 or greater, Recommended Webserver: Apache or LightSpeed. Website: www.wordpress.org

2 . Flatpress - this is another open source blogging tool. Unlike Wordpress, this does not require you to have a MySQL support on your web server. It writes it entries on  text files. You can easily customize its theme just as like Wordpress but still this is under development and not a replacement for Wordpress but at least if you have a web server that does not support MySQL (like our website ) you can use it instead of Wordpress. Download at https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=157089. Latest Flatpress version: 0.705 Crescendo. Requirements: PHP4. Website: www.flatpress.org

3.  Joomla - this is another powerful open source web content management systems that is used all over the world. Here in the Philippines, Visayas Local Government is currently using this open source CMS to their Municipality & City government websites. It has a rich and advance features that allows you to control the appearance of your site. Like wordpress, you can easily customized the theme of the site. It also has a feature that shows the status of each page in the site. Joomla is also good in archiving your web content. You can download it from http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/frs/. Joomla Stable Version: 1.013, Release Candidate Version: 1.5 RC4. Requirements: PHP & MySQL. Website: www.joomla.org

4. Drupal - Drupal is another open source content management platform that also allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize content on a website. Download site: http://drupal.org/download. Latest Drupal version: 5.5, Release Candidate version: 6.0 RC1. Requirements: PHP 4 or higher (for PHP5.x Drupal 5.x is recommended) and MySQL. Website: http://drupal.org/

These are the CMS I've tried. If you want more information regarding Open Source CMS, there's a site for comprehensive information. Visit it at http://www.opensourcecms.com.

To help you study this CMS, you can deploy temporarily these CMS to some free php hosting sites so you will not spend while studying these CMSs, like the site that I'm currently using. Sign-up at http://www.freeweb7.com/ or http://www.hyperphp.com for a free PHP with MySQL web hosting site. Good luck!

If you want for any assistance on installation or configuration of this tools for your website or you want me to do all this stuff for you, simply contact Filipino web designer & programmer from Capiz, Philippines (that's me) via email my address fbaguyo@hotmail.com. It's my pleasure to serve you.