Continuing our series on the 9 Most Popular Fansite Platforms, we turn our attention to Content Management Systems (or CMS).
Content Management Systems are computer application’s used to manage work flow needed to collaboratively create, edit, review, index, search, publish and archive various kinds of digital media and electronic text. In terms of fansite creation, CMS allow you to build and control rich content, including text, pictures, audio, video and more.
One of the most popular fansite-orientated content management systems is Joomla.
What is Joomla? Well, I’ll let them describe:
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.
I wont lie, I prefer blogs because I find them more intuitive. They allow me to do all the things that I want to do with my fansite content and can even be transformed into content management systems with little trouble. That said, Joomla is a decent alternative for managing online fandom content.
My perception of Joomla is that it’s more suited to corporate or small business web management – most fansite owners that I know tend to opt for one of the blogging or forum platforms for the reasons I mentioned above.
In my experience, Joomla requires more technical knowledge than, say, starting a WordPress blog, although their documentation does claim to require little technical knowledge. Again, I would add that Joomla’s learning curve is steeper than some of the blog alternatives, but it offers powerful content management (text, photos, video, music, etc) once you get the hang of it.
There are, of course, other Content Management Systems, such as Drupal, Mambo and many others. There’s really no limit to the kind of fansite you can make with CMS – as always, it boils down to personal preference, the learning curve, and how relevant the tools/plugins are to your fandom.
