Content Management Systems (CMS) are one of the exciting new developments in web design over the past few years. Although basic CMS systems have been around for many years, recent advances in both hardware and software systems have allowed these systems to flourish.

Rutten Technology Services has chosen Joomla! as our prefered CMS.

What is a CMS?

A Content Mangement System is a system that allows easy input and editing of online content for a web site.  This may be done by a select group of trained users, or even by casual site visitors.  CMS is designed so content is automatically formatted to fit the overall web site theme, look and feel. 

Recent Developments

Early CMS's used a variety of models, such as special software to "talk" to your website and upload any changes.  Recent times have seen more bandwidth available to Internet users and improvements in server side technologies.  These take the load from the viewer's computer onto the main web server. Modern CMS's tend to use a web-interface for the editing, thus allowing editing from any computer with a web browser.  So now one, or many people can be responsible for editing and updating your website - simultaneously if needed!

These systems have been used for some time.  They have only been accessible to the elite "top end" of the market where web sites were large enough to warrant a team of developers to create or customise a specific CMS.  No longer are CMS's just available to large corporate sites and governmental organisations - Ruttentech is able to offer it for any site.

Open Source Projects

A recent success story of software development is the rise of "open source" software projects.  This is software that is free for the general public to use under it's own GNU General Public Licence.  This licence allows anyone to use the software for free, without claiming it is their own or charging for the intellectual property.

Open source software is developed online via large, distributed teams of developers - all working toward improvement of the project, software and community.  It is hoped that people use open source software and then contribute to the project by finding and reporting bugs, suggesting improvements and publishing customisations that may be relevant to the wider community.

Note that "open source" does not mean "totally free".  The basic code and ideas are free of charge, but services like setting up, customising, servicing and supporting these systems may be charged for.  The underlying aim is to take the value or profit in software away from the original intellectual property (which history has shown may lie with people other than the original creators anyway) and place it with those that add value to it.

The RuttenTech Choice

The RuttenTech Team has chosen to work with a specific open source CMS after looking at many products on the market today.  We looked at traditional proprietary systems, small development projects and open source projects.

What did we choose? - Joomla!  This system has been around for a few years in various forms and has proven to be feature rich, stable and popular.  Our own website is powered by Joomla! and we develop Joomla! powered sites for those clients who need a CMS.

The benefits of  Joomla! as an open source project is that it is powerful and versatile - and best of all, it is within the reach of most businesses and organisations.  To find out if a Joomla! powered CMS is right for you, contact us to discuss solutions to your web publishing issues.