Give your website a more professional touch

By RICHARD WOOD

Perhaps your ambition takes you beyond what Citydesk offers. You want e-commerce, discussion forums, or fancy search functions built in.

If you have a programming bent you might do what I did for my own ITKiwi.com site.

After prototyping in Citydesk I headed for the more complex option and rebuilt it over three weeks at Christmas in a system called eZ Publish 3.

EZ Publish was the only one, of a lot of free-to-use 'open source' systems I tried, that downloaded in a Windows version and ran right away.

Underneath it was uses the open source MySQL database, PHP web language, Image Magick image manipulation, and Apache web server, which all installed
automatically along with it.

For most other CMS systems you need to install these components yourself and there is little in the way of Windows documentation.

I started with the demo site that came with eZ Publish and very early on chopped out all the modules I didn't need, simplifying it considerably.

Designing templates in eZ Publish is very logical but is quite dependent on HTML code knowledge and programming skills.

When I had finished I was surprised I could simply copy it up to Linux servers at my host at Nucleus and almost everything worked right away.

The hard part was finding out by trial and error what some of the more obscure and mostly undocumented commands did, and ironing out problems with the help of the eZ publish community online and the hosting service's technical support.

It was a free lunch but a long one and only time will tell if I should have stuck with Citydesk.

On the web:
Ez Publish -
www.ez.no