Introduction | What Is It?

Content Management System (CMS)

Little Piggy is a PHP/MySQL Content Management System. Well, what does that mean exactly? What is a Content Management System? Let's start by saying that 'Content Management System' is usually abbreviated to CMS for simplicity. A CMS enables the designer to design a website that is fully dynamic, that means content can be easily submitted without touching the code that goes into designing the actual page. The page will create itself essentially, and all indexes listing that content will be automatically updated to include it too.

Form Elements

PHP and MySQL

Content is added to the website via traditional web forms, and the CMS takes the data you entered and adds it to a database. In this case, MySQL databases are used, because they are free and fast. If you are thinking of using Little Piggy, make sure your server has MySQL support. The information is moved from the forms to the database using PHP, a programming language essentially. It is well known across the internet as a fast and efficient language that uses very little computing power. Your server will need PHP support too, PHP5 being recommended.

Templates

So the content is in a database, how does anyone actually see it? Well, that's where templates come in. Templates basically consist of the glitzy design that contains your content. Instead of typing your content straight into a webpage, you insert tags, Piggy Tags, where you would like your content to appear. So if you wanted to show your content's title, you would create your design, and then type the Piggy Tag <|ContentTitle|> where you want it to show. The CMS then replaces that tag with the actual title of the content item the browser is trying to view. This means that you basically have one page that can show any number of different pages, depending on which content item the browser wants to view.

Template Creation

Categories

Depending on the scale of your site and it's nature, you may want different sections in your site. If you are building a news site, you may wanted to seperate your news items by country or topic. For this, you need Content Categories. This simply allows you to select which category you want to add your content to, and it will be kept seperate from your other categories of news, meaning you can index it seperately too. You may have a site that has different types of content. For example, you may have a news section, and you may have a gallery section. If you want to create a gallery section, you would create a Gallery Category and add your content to that. This builds a gallery system for you, based on the template you make for it of course.

Summing Up

So as you can see, a CMS exists to make your life easier. It attempts to automate as much as possible, so that you have less work to do, and they make large scale websites with lots of content more possible and manageable. If this sounds like the sort of thing you want, head over to 'Why Little Piggy?' for more detailed information on what Little Piggy has to offer you.