About this book

This book walks you through understanding your requirements by elaborating on the different options available for your CMS, and thus helps you make a choice. It then covers common tasks—installation, design customization, plug-ins, content editing and management, and so on—in detail, for specific CMS types. The book even covers specialized CMSs, hosting, working with developers, and getting help from the CMS community.

This book helps you understand your requirements first. It walks you through a simple yet effective method of listing down what you want your web site to do. You are then introduced to different types of CMSs such as blogs, forums, general purpose CMS, e-commerce tools, collaboration, and more. This helps you narrow down your search.

This is followed by practical guides on doing some common tasks with any CMS. These tasks include installation, setting up a design, creating navigation structure, entering and editing content, adding pictures, enhancing functionality with extensions and plug-ins, and publishing the site. Here you learn skills that can be applied to any CMS you choose.

It then covers different types of CMSs in detail. The book is full of how-tos for popular CMSs, and listings of other choices that you have. No matter what your need is, you will certainly develop useful skills with this book.

At the end, the book covers important subtopics that usually go uncovered: how to select a web host for your site; how to select and work with a software developer/vendor for customizations; how to get help from community resources and winners of Packt's CMS awards.

Overall, this book helps you throughout the process of building and launching your CMS-powered web site.