Open Source is a wonderful new part of software development. How can it not be wonderful, it's free! So why pay for the iMakeSense Content Managment System when you could go and get another Open Source Content Mangement System for free?

 

This of course is an excellent question. One we had to answer ourselves in the beginning of our business venture. How could we sell something that can be obtained for free? In fact, we considered making our Content Management System Open Source for a while. Alas, Open Source Licensing is complicated and vague at the moment for those of us who want to use it for running a business and so we decided against it.

 

The answer is not overly complicated. iMakeSense provides a service and a product, rather than just a product. At iMakeSense, we wanted to provide much more than just a Content Management System. We wanted to be able to manage our software versions for our clients, fix bugs and keep their websites up and running. We also wanted to do this at no extra cost to our clients. This meant not allowing people to touch the code on the server so we could run a common code base. Not allowing clients access to their code is against most Open Source Licensing and kept us from running our business using an open source model.

 

What else do we do?

 

We set up a 10 page website for you in the beginning. This is a launching point for your business. Getting started is the most difficult part of website development. This alone can keep many people from venturing into the waters of the do-it-yourself open source world.

 

To explain in more detail, I'll go into just basics of what it takes to setup an Open Source website. It can be really easy if the CMS has a good setup and you know what you're doing.

 

1. You'll need a web host. Probably running some sort of Linux server that supports php & MySql. While these aren't the only server setups out there for Open Source it's probably the most common requirements. Here's the first hosting business I found on Google while using the search term 'hosting'.

 

This is hosting.com.

To get the requirments we need the fees are as follows:

Setup fee is 49.00

Monthly fee is 34.95

 

This is not apples to apples comparison with our hosting allowances.
Our lowest fee is 58.49 setup and 20.00 monthly. Hosting.com gives you more server space and bandwidth but limits you to 25MB of database storage. Since we're running a database driven application, this is probably not the best provider but it'll do for our example.

 

Ok, we found our hosting provider. On to the next step.

 

2. You need to find an open source Content Management System. We'll pick ezPublish.

Here are some claims they make:

 

It's sounds exciting doesn't it? I've actually set their site up before. fun fun.

 

3. Now you need to download the source code and then upload the source code to your new server account you just purchased from hosting.com.

 

To do this you'll need an ftp client.

 

4. Ok, you've just uploaded all your souce code files with your new ftp client you found on the internet. If you're lucky you found a free ftp client. If not you just paid another 30.00.

 

5. Woo hoo, we've just read the installation instructions and we're ready to go. we run the installation file... and oops, we get an error message... cannot create database... please manually create your database and try again. Hmm, why did this happen? This happens very often in Open Source Applications. This is b/c most hosting providers do not allow you to create a database through a script. You have to login to your account and create it manually. But this isn't a problem for those of us that know what we're doing. We just login, find the database manager, create a new database, set the account names and passwords and run the setup script again. Woo hoo, it worked.

 

6. Now we're staring at our shiny new ezPublish website. Now what? Well, we need to create some webpages to show off our business. Pages like: about us, services, directions ect... how do you do that? To be honest.. I could never figure it out. I guess I'm not that smart. I am by no means putting ezPublish down. Its an excellent CMS. More than a million people have downloaded it. I just don't understand how it works.. I need help. So I go back to the website for help.. I look for training.. I find it. http://www.ez.no/services/training/technical_course. There's a four day course I can pay for to learn how to use their content management system. Umm.. no thanks. I'll just fiddle with it for a while or... how about I write my own..

 

7. Let's assume you're smarter than me and actually figured out how to create webpage and insert content into them. You're awesome. On to the next task. You need to customize the template design to reflect your business. Umm... time to learn a new language called html. There are a ton of online html tutorials out there to help you figure out how to do website design, have fun, it's a blast.

 

8. You're done! or are you? There's a bad bug you just found... or a security update that needs to be run. You'll have to keep tabs on the ezPublish website to see when the next version release is available so you can update the source code and keep your site safe and running well.

 

 

We train you how to use our content management system for free. While we feel our basic tasks of website management make sense, any new software requires a bit of learning. In addition to the intial training, questions will pop up later on and we're here to answer them for you.

 

If you're an avid do-i-yourselfer like I am. You don't or wait.. you still do kinda. Huh? Unfortunately, It's almost impossible to have a content management system completely free on the internet. Completely free hosting won't get you a database. So you'll have to at least pay 5 dollars a month for a sketchy hosting business. What do I mean by sketchy? Well you get what you pay for. The trials of finding a great host are character building to say the least. I recommend only one hosting provider. Httpme.com. In the 5 years I've been at this, they have been the best to work with. And while we have our own servers now, I still keep an account open with them for other projects. In fact, we run our corporate website on one of Httpme's servers. We wanted to have our corporate website at a different location than our productions servers in case a local network outage happened. We wanted our clients to be able to contact us. By the way, Httpme.com starts at 35.00 a month.