CMSMS 1.6 – Chapters 10 and 11
April 21st, 2010
The final two chapters of the book deal with advanced topics that can enhance a site that’s already up and running. The first extra feature to be examined is enabling a site for multi language capabilities with user submitted, not automatic, translations. I can’t say I’ve had a need to do this yet, but when creating a site for an international corporation this would be a vital step. The next items of interest I felt were way out of place as they should have been dealt with much earlier in the book in the chapter on creating templates. Creating additional editable content blocks and optimizing the site for search engines really should be thought about when the site is first being coded and are far more instrumental than multi-language capabilities. After taking a look at user defined tags and an events dispatcher there is a study on integrating jQuery into a site which is yet another item I feel better belongs in the chapter about templates. In today’s world jQuery and other JavaScript libraries are becoming so widely used that they really are part of a template and not just extra functionality.
Chapter 11 closes the book with a rather dull read on creating site and database backups, which must be done with two modules, seeking help on any CMSMS problems, and performance tuning. These are important concepts, but it was a dreary read and I think perhaps the advanced functionality or a case study of a really well done site would have been a better way to end the book.
Overall though, this is an incredibly useful and easy to digest manual for getting started with one of the best CMS applications available today.