Weblogs versus Content Management Systems

When I started looking for open source software to create a blog, there were a lot of choices. I focused on several applications that were considered Content Management Systems (or CMS). At first glance, I thought it was just another name for blog applications, but when I downloaded and installed Joomla!®, it was clear that a CMS is more than a blog. In fact, if you want to use a CMS as a blog, it's very likely you'll need to download additional modules, because a CMS can do a lot of things besides blogging. For example, you can have an integrated forum, the news at the front page does not necessarily have a chronological order, some CMS systems have a chat and a photo gallery, and a lot of other things that were very confusing for me. All I wanted was, a blog where I could start writing stuff about computers, programming languages, and tutorials to share with other bloggers, and who knows, maybe one day start writing the next fiction bestseller!

A blog is not a CMS

In most cases, a blog is considered a CMS because it's used to manage content in a website. However, in my humble opinion, a blog definitely is not a CMS. With a CMS, you can do a lot more than post messages in a chronological order and receive comments. That beats one of the main purposes of a blog—to express yourself in a friendly environment, like a personal diary. Sure, you can use a CMS as a blog, but you'll have to learn how to manage its user interface and maybe add a few extra modules or plugins. With a weblog server like Apache Roller, you're ready to go! In later chapters, we'll talk about templates and how to modify the appearance of your blog's pages by adding video, audio, and images. You'll see how easy it is to manage your Apache Roller server.