CMS systems - Lack of Full Control - October 19th, 2006
Many websites, particularly complex sites and shopping carts, use Content Management Systems (CMS) to allow the site’s content to be quickly and easily edited, without the need for any HTML or coding knowledge by the user.
Whilst this can be great for developing powerful sites with ease, it can also provide headaches to web developers and SEO programmers.
CMS software often works with a set of page templates, from which it constructs the output content of your pages from database data. This provides a problem when wanting to customise content, or fix errors, in a way that the CMS does not permit.
Content wise, many CMS systems will not let you deviate too much from their specification.
In general CMS systems will not allow you full control over the HTML of your pages, and many will change any edited HTML back to it’s original state if you try to deviate from it!
Sometimes it is necessary to remove the index / home page from the CMS in order to render it as you wish, to make it SEO friendly and W3C valid for example.
Some CMS systems will let you do this, whereas others may not.
A possible work around for this is to take advantage of the “default document preference order” of your web server.
For example, a CMS written in ASP for Windows Server may produce its homepage as index.asp, but by creating a separate homepage as default.asp, your page will be served as the default document by your web server. Assuming that default.asp is higher up the default document list than index.asp. You can then link into index.asp as, for example, the shopping site front page.
Mike Irving
ASP Web Developer
