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03/15/2008: "Website Maintenance"

By nature the Internet is ever changing and sooner or later you have to clean out the old posts or spend many hours adding, editing and deleting links. After publishing several websites and dealing with the ongoing maintenance issues for several years I decided there must be a better way to keep sites up to date and save lots of time without any need for compromises. This is not a new idea or concept, I have been testing and evaluating content management systems since 2003 but I have never found a suitable solution to suit my needs. The documentation of the basic content managemant system I have developed to satisfy the reguirements will be documented here from the analysis of the requirements all the way through to completion. When 'Dolphin Hall Content Management System' has been fully tested operating on my own websites for an extended period it will be made available for sale to others.

I have used a variety of content management systems and found them all to be very good doing what they were designed to do, taking the hard work out of maintaining web sites but they are not as flexible as a webpage and they require more resources than a static site. You can put anything you like on a webpage and use any editing tool you prefer at the expense of having to edit each page individually during site updates. Both approaches are a compromise so I needed to develop a system to overcome some complex issues.

Shortfalls of Webpages

Manual editing of menu links and page layout makes long term maintenance a major issue, even adding a new page to the site becomes difficult. Keeping the pages the same becomes harder as a site grows and minor differences become headaches when it is time to upgrade the design of a site. Even the best web design needs to be upgraded every year or 2 to look fresh and reflect the sites direction.

Shortfalls of CMS

The number of files involved makes modifications to the way the system works very limited and the one design is usually used across the entire site. Editing pages is usually with an online interface, each has its own limitations and complications for the user. In particular inclusion of images is not as simple as it is on a static webpage and reuse of image files on seperate pages is not as easy. Difficult to include other packages like link pages.

Well all I need is a CMS with the fexibility of a static webpage that includes a link management system.