Building Websites with OpenCms

Rating:
Summary: free code, but with a learning curve
Review: Once upon a time (10 years ago), content management programs were expensive proprietary packages. But recently, the open source movement has produced OpenCMS. However, though it is free, the complexity of usage can be high. And the documentation that comes with it is too daunting for many would-be users.

Butcher offers you a more pleasant alternative with this book. He writes for a programmer familiar with XML and Java. Plus, you should also have some knowledge of JSP for making dynamic HTML pages for websites. While JSPs are powerful, they don't allow for multiple authors to edit and publish HTML pages, or for a versioning system to mediate access to these pages. This needs extra code interacting with the JSPs. In a nutshell, OpenCMS does this.

The book walks through the usage. Many screen captures of the browser interface that is how the users access it. No fancy effects, like with Flash or Dreamweaver. But all the essentials are present and described by Butcher.

He also discusses the back end database that the web server for OpenCMS uses. A fair amount of customising is possible here; with concomitant complexity. But if your website is not "too" large, you may be able to avoid dealing with many details of the database. [Just remember to regularly back it up to tape or CD!]