website content management confusion

olias

I am at the very early stages of learning website design/development and am getting to grips with the basics. I am looking at setting up a few websites of my own to generate some income through affiliate marketing. I also, however, am considering offering my services to design and develop websites for small local businesses in the future (I live in a fairly rural area with the nearest web development businesses a considerable distance away in the larger towns which I am hoping will help me get local business).

Anyway, my question is what methods are there to integrate an user admin/content management system into a website? For example, if I designed a site for a local pub, they would want to be able to change the menu on it regularly themselves without coming back to me.

I have done some googling, and am aware of open source programs such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc, but these seem to be more for blogging, and that you would use them to create your whole site.

Where would I find information on what coding to use to integrate a content management system into my own sites? Preferably an open source option which will provide the neccessary coding to cut and paste into my xhtml.

I am not expecting a full explanation of how to do this in the space available on a forum, but a link to somewhere I could find the info or a tutorial would be great. Thanks.

I will be using Dreamweaver if that makes any difference.

Olias

GeoffX

Although not a direct answer to your question, Christopher Heng's sites TheSiteWizard and TheFreeCountry are well worth a visit.

RobTang

It vastly depends on the content management system you choose.

But generally you will use the CMS as a base, then style it to make it look like whatever you want.

Each usually as an api or template / framework system that allows you to work with the CMS, but as I said it varies from CMS to CMS, each will tend to have a developer community that has tutorials wil answer questions etc.

I have only personally used wordpress but its very good

olias

Thanks for the replies.

So are you saying that rather than (as I thought) creating a website (in Dreamweaver) and then adding coding to enable an end user to alter or update content themselves, it would actually be the other way round - ie I would create a template website using say Wordpress or one of the others, and then style it to my own design in Dreamweaver?

What I am after is a system similar to one I found while googling - whereby an end user can go into the admin section of their website which I have created, and simply click on the text or image they want to change and then for example, re write the text or change the image. The one I looked at opened up a window similar to a word document, which allowed the end user with no specialist knowledge to simply alter and save the text to change it on their website. Unfortunately the example I found was a paid for program, whereas I am looking for an open source option.

I may be over complicating things. Going back to the example I used in my OP. If say a site was designed for a pub. How would the website designer usually go abaout including an admin section to the site to allow the Landlord himself to say change the food menu that appears on his site?

Olias

wonka

The example of a pub can still be accomplished by a general CMS like Wordpress. Since a menu could be written in a Word processor, conversely it could also be written in a CMS page. Or maybe even a PDF.

But there are some scenarios where a general CMS isn't appropriate, such as online shop, hotel bookings, exchange, etc. Although these days a well-supported CMS like Wordpress provides plugins to handle such examples.