CMS vs BLOGS

CMS verses BLOGS

Both blogs and content management systems (CMS) “invite social interactivity” and one is able to “leave comments, register as a user or…become a contributor” (www.unfoldingneurons.com) however I want to investigate what the difference is between the two with regards to purpose and how they work. I will mainly focus on CMS’s and will refer to comparisons of blogs.

I logged on to www.wordpress.com which is a blog and signed up as a user. I had to enter personal details in to the form presented. It was that simple. I was then able to log on and enter my own content, via an administrative frontier, that was then displayed on the web page that the rest of the world sees. Similarly, I logged on to www.myspace.com which is said to be a CMS and then signed up as a user. Likewise I had to fill in a form of my personal details. Once this was done I was then able to add more information, as I did in the blog, via the modules and “blocks [that] are added to build the website” (www.unfoldingneurons.com) Where CMS’s have many modules and blocks already, blogs merely have “one module (which is the core)” and have the option to add more blocks such as widgets or plugins.

After adding content to my CMS via the administrative interface I opened the source from the displayed profile page in an attempt to find the information I imputed via the administrative page and to try to change the ‘About me’ section:




It did change as intended on my displayed profile. At this point I became rather confused as to how exactly these pages all interlink and work together; particularly how the administrative page works with the actual displayed profile page. Baring this in mind I decided to go back to the administrative page. I viewed the source to search for the ‘about me’ section. Here, as with the source code for the actual displayed profile page and the administrative interface page, I could edit the information. Both the source of the admin page and the source of the display page held my added content and on both I could edit my content. Things were starting to become clearer; I could now make links to what I was experiencing and what I had found via my research:
The diagram below from http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_what/index.html shows the basic way in which a CMS (and a blog for that matter) work.








Clearly I have experienced that the content creation and the presentation of my profile are at two ends of the spectrum where the CMS manages the link between the two. “Once a page has been created, it is saved into a central repository in the CMS”. This is how the information that I type in via the admin interface is then loaded up for presentation, hence why the ‘about me’ section was in both the source of the admin page AND the display page. “The CMS will build the site navigation for you, by reading the structure straight out of the content repository.” No HTML skills are required as the admin interface automatically creates the code for you and implements your content, hence why when I edit information via the admin interface it will then automatically appear in the source. It is simply a user friendly access method to changing the source code non-technically.

When I edited my profile on www.myspace.com I was able to add music, pictures and videos by planting the code in to one of the blocks via the admin page. The language used to create these interactive websites is PHP which makes sense as it can be “embedded or combined with the HTML or a website” (W. Hugh and L. David, PHP and MySQL, p.16)

Therefore I searched the source of my CMS display page for the use of PHP in order to see whether it had been used for any of the multimedia on my profile. The first I found was within a hyper reference:

http://www.urbnmix2.net/video.php?id=adam_sandler_grow_old_with_you

I copied this in to a new window browser and found that it linked to a whole new website. The only PHP used referred to a number of these ‘urbanmix2.net/video’ links.










I found these links within the comments added, by other users, on my profile. It makes sense that this is the only place where PHP was used as this is where the videos were implemented. “PHP's ability includes outputting images, PDF files and even Flash movies” (http://uk.php.net/manual/en/intro-whatcando.php 2007)

Clearly this demonstrates what I have learned that PHP is often used within CMS’s and blogs to incorporate “dynamic content derived from user input” (W. Hugh and L. David, PHP and MySQL, p.18)

I then attempted to change the look of my ‘myspace’ profile by using a template. Again I simply copied the relevant code in to one of the modules. This gives reason to my research that states that the majority of CMS’s have a “main core…[where] these various ‘modules’ and ‘blocks’ are added…and then skinned by a theming / templating system.” (www.unfoldingneurons.com) This is clearly what allows the user to embed their contributed content in to different templates as the blocks/modules can be extracted and transferred, “leaving existing content and page architecture untouched… [as] the CMS will pull the content into the new look” (http://typo3.com/What_is_a_CMS.1351.0.html) On the other hand, I was unable to completely change the layout of my blog as “generally speaking the components [structure] stays the same” as a blog “is usually a core defaulting to a certain layout”. (http://www.unfoldingneurons.com/2007/cms-vs-blogno-you-dont-need-pepto-bismol) hence the one module that it consists of as opposed to many.

I’ve learned the basics of how blogs and CMS’s are similarly and differently structured and the basics of how they work using “content display sections” and modules via an “administrative interface.” (http://www.unfoldingneurons.com/2007/cms-vs-blogno-you-dont-need-pepto-bismol) Blogs are merely a very simple version of a CMS; practically an element of a CMS hence; a CMS can include a ‘blog’ along with plenty more elements due to its more flexible foundation; its larger number of modules and blocks. Blogs “usually [have] one purpose”: to share information, whereas a CMS can have a number of purposes including selling products.

Where I came across some PHP I have also learned some basic PHP language as demonstrated in my appendix.