Paysite Success
Lesson #32 
Content Management Basics
Written By Titmowse
What if you had software that would enable you to administer your whole paysite from one program? What if you could edit, update and manage all the tasks you perform (as a paysite owner) online and automatically? What would you pay to get your hands on such a wonderful tool? Does such software even exist?
Bah! You say. You have a very nice ftp program, thank you. With it, you can click on HTML files and edit the code right on the ftp server. Or maybe you have a swell webpage creation program with lots of bells and whistles, plus it’s own ftp, auto-uploader. You don’t need some overblown application for site management.
The reality is you can manage a paysite with software that resides on your hard drive. You can buy your content, edit it and format it. Then you can open your fancy webpage creation software and create new pages or add to existing ones. After that you can ftp/upload everything to your web server. You might even hand edit the code on a few HTML pages while you’re in ftp (ftp = File Transfer Protocol) mode. You can do all that.
But what if you’re not an HTML guru? What if you’re pretty darned busy dealing with customer support and shopping/creating next month’s new content? What if you just want to do all the things you need to do without opening up ten different pieces of software? What if there were a program that let you search for your site’s files and images by name. What if there were a program that lets you batch process images, auto-generate galleries and pages as well as auto-update your whole paysite? What if that same management system was way easy to use because it has a wizard-style interface?
A content management system is a combination of scripts and software that makes the job of running a paysite almost as simple as paying someone else to do it.
The content management system integrates two components: A CMA application and a CDA application. CMA stands for content management application. CDA stands for content delivery application. The CMA part of the mix resides on your machine. The CDA portion resides on your web server.
When you operate the CMA, that’s when you do all the editing and page/document creation. Then when you’re done with your CMA, you just tell the CDA. It does the rest and blammo, your paysite is all fresh and updated!
Content management systems are usually written in Perl or PHP. Content management systems (CMS) need to be compatible with the type of web server you have for your host. If your adult paysite is on an NT server, then you need to make sure your’s works on an NT server. Usually, it doesn’t matter if your server is virtual/shared or dedicated, CMS generally runs fine on either.
In future lessons we’ll explore CMS on a deeper level. Until now, just remember you can manage your whole adult paysite easily and often and all at once. You can do it with a Content Management System.
Some CMS providers, listed on both Cozy Frog and Cozy Academy are:
For content management programs and related links can be found in our Software resource listings!
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