Web applications ease site management

As a web site grows, more pages, images and other content are added, new directories must be created and navigations menus updated. At some point doing that manually becomes onerous. Factor in the complexity of adding other site features and functionality, and it becomes attractive to seek other solutions.

Web applications are growing in popularity, because the best of them facilitate site building, site growth and feature enhancement. They offer a range of functions that would be difficult to replicate separately.

Three of the most popular and feature-rich applications are Magento, Joomla and Drupal.

Magento
Magento is an open-source e-commerce web application. It incorporates a web store, shopping cart, database and more. Their is support for accounting software such as Quickbooks, and payment modules such as Authorize.net and Paypal.

Magento provides a professional web store for a lower cost than traditional e-commerce systems. Administration is designed to be simple.

Functionality can be extended by adding modules. Because the developers published Magento as open source, a large community has developed that creates additional modules. Modules are shared with the community and, once approved by the Magento team, are available for any Magento user to install.

Magento includes extensive analysis and reporting, to tell you what is selling, the most-viewed products, identify your best customers, and other useful information. Unlike some open source shopping carts, it supports customer accounts, so customers can save their details and more easily re-order.

Content management systems
A content management system (CMS) is software that keeps track of every piece of content on a web site. It’s really a database that knows every content file on the site and where it is used. Content can be text, images, music, video, PDF files: anything used on a web site. A CMS handles much of the organizational and administrative tasks that a web administrator would otherwise need to do.

Joomla
Joomla has become a hugely popular content management system, used on small sites and those of large organizations. It is widely recognized as one of the best open source CMSs. It offers a fast and intuitive way to build your website and manage its content.

Joomla requires no knowledge of PHP or MySQL, as it handles those technologies behind the scenes. This allows for creation of dynamic, content rich websites in less time. Thousands of Joomla plugins and templates are available free of charge for you to add features and change the visual appearance of your website.

Common Joomla features include RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language multiple languages.

Drupal
Drupal is another popular CMS that lets you manage all news, data and content on your website. Drupal is one of the best known and most widely used content management systems. It facilitates building content rich and script powered websites with no knowledge of programming or scripting. As with Joomla, Drupal is enhanced by a large developer community.

There are strengths and relative weaknesses of both Joomla and Drupal. One may be more appropriate for you than the other. I’ve read that Drupal may be better for sites that are intended to foster community participation, while Joomla may be better suited and have better administration tools for managing all the content on an organization’s site.

To decide, first identify what features are most important for your site, who will administer your site and the extent of his or her skills, and how the site is intended to grow over time. Spend time on the web site of each and read through some of the community forums to get a sense of how others are using these two CMSs.

A good system will provide the framework to help you to grow the site, while you focus on what you’re presenting to site visitors. Whether your site sells tulip bulbs, shares photos and short stories, or hosts international discussion groups, you may find that a web application makes site management easier.