Newbie dynamic website FAQ

A lot of these questions seem to come up about dynamic websites, so I thought I'd try and group a few of the common answers together.

Q. What is a CMS - do I need one?
A. CMS stands for Content Management System. They work by seperating the page content and page design on your website, which means that you can update your website by an admin console, rather than paying a website designer to download, edit and upload your pages.

If you make a lot of changes to your website, or have a lot of content then you probably need a CMS


Q. What CMS should I use?
A. Depends on what you are looking to do. If your looking to start a Blog or manage articles that people can comment on then Wordpress is quite good. If your looking to run a community site with news, polls then I would look at joomla, mambo, phpnuke, xoops, drupal

Sarahk has a page about which CMS to use: http://sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/blog/which-cms/


Q. Where can I find a script to do?
A. There are heaps of websites with script archives of both free and paid packages. www.hotscripts.com is a good place to get you started


Q. Are static pages better than dynamically produced pages?
A. Static webpages are made up of html code, and usually have a file extension like .htm and html.

Dynamic webpages are made up of html code and can have ANY extension including .htm .html .asp .php .shtml and loads more

The only real difference between them is how the pages are made.

With static pages your webdesigner makes the page and uploads it to your website. When someone visits your website their browser requests the page, and your webserver sends it out.

With dynamic pages when someone visits your website their browser requests the page, your webserver makes the page, and then sends it out.

In both cases the visitor to your site gets an html page - there is no difference.


Q. Are pages on my dynamic website with addresses like /article.php?stuff=23&s=a bad?
A. Search engines are able to find and add pages with addresses like this to their indexes. The information after ? is known as the query string. Some search engines have said that query strings with id=23 type information are seen as less important, they have also said that really really long ones with lots of &=variable in them are not indexed.
So in summary they are not bad unless you are passing lots of variables in the query string


Q. How do I make my urls go from /article.php?id=23&s=love to /article/love-23.php
A. Mod_rewrite is your friend. It will rewrite your urls for you. Nintendo wrote an excellent post on this, so no need to repeat it here visit http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=23044&highlight=mod_rewrite

If you know of more newbie FAQ's please post them here

 

good faq. will reference questions to this thread.

 

Thanks Stuw, good info.