Your Blogging Services Portal

A Content Management System is a computer application that permits the creation, editing, publishing and manipulation of content on a website.  These systems are usually used for the storing and retrieval of technical and user’s manuals, news articles, brochures, guides, among others.  The content itself may be constructed of any file type: images, audio/video files, spreadsheet and word processor documents, or any form of Web content.

The primary types of Content Management Systems include:  Enterprise, Web and Component systems. 

1. An enterprise CMS focuses on content and documents oriented towards the organizational processes of a business enterprise, and have a primary function in managing the organization’s unstructured information content.
2. A Web CMS focuses on content and documents specifically designed for Web publication by non-technical content creators.
3. A component CMS focuses on content within documents, often managing structured content, such as XML, to locate, link and render content at any level of organization.  This content is then often sent over to Enterprise and Web Content Management Systems. 

The five primary aspects of Content Management Systems include the following:

1. Versioning. The ability to keep, and roll back as required, previous versions of content, even after content is updated.
2. Granular User Management. This is the ability to assign and differentiate users based upon permission levels.
3. Content Organization and Relation. This is the ability to position content in both larger organizational structures as well as in relation to other content.
4. File and Image Management.  This is the ability of the system to store files in relation to the content that uses them.
5. Multi-State Content. This refers to the system’s ability to store content in a variety of states, from ‘in-progress’ to ‘archived’ to ‘active’ or ‘inactive’.

Along with these core functional requirements of a basic CMS, such systems often include a collection of other features and enhancements including extensibility and integration, scheduled publishing and expiration, task management and collaboration, among others.  The capability of such systems to pick and choose among such a wide array of functions provides evidence that no strict definition yet exists.  The CMS, as a technology structure, continues to advance as users and developers define and refine their needs and definitions.

Multilingual content management systems are meant to make the entire process of managing multilingual content easier, faster and more effective. Basically such a system gives the content developer the ability to deploy what is known as the master set of content.

What this means is that you do not need to possess any HTML knowledge whatsoever. On the contrary, content can be directly entered into the CMS without requiring the assistance of the webmaster. In the case of localization a multilingual CMS will not require you to have any HTML knowledge thereby enabling you to work directly with the system.

The key function of multilingual CMS is to allow the content developer and translator to handle the entire ordeal himself without having to learn the technical language. On an average such systems can reduce your time to market by up to 50%.

Multilingual content management systems have manifold benefits. Amongst the primary benefits of such a system is the fact that it eliminates operator error. Since the data in various languages and applications will not be changing hands the risk of errors is minimized thereby guaranteeing error free work.

The use of such systems also helps to bring down the cost of translation. Furthermore the translator needs to have minimal technical knowledge. This will cut down on outsourced translation expenses as you incorporate in house language skills.

Another major benefit of employing multilingual content management systems comes in the form of improved coordination between web and other marketing media. Coordinating multiple media is perhaps the most challenging aspect of working with multiple languages. Issues like inconsistency can creed up in coordination across media. Multilingual content management systems can be used to overcome this difficulty and make the entire process far more effective.

Another way in which Multilingual systems can help to facilitate your operations is by giving you the opportunity to recycle and reuse translated content. In the past organizations have had to pay for getting the same content translated again. With multilingual CMS however you can coordinate the same content through different media thereby removing the need to get the same content translated again.

When it comes to website localization you need to have a customized presentation that is tailored to the particular market in question. The Thai look may not work well for the German version of the website and vice versa. This customization need could arise with regards to the colors, presentation and use of graphics. In some cases you may even be required to change the entire look and feel of the website. Without employing a multilingual content management system this could be a rather daunting, costly and time consuming task.

Lastly you will find the best of multilingual CMS to be offering you cross platform compatibility. This means you will be able to work on Linux, Max, and Windows along with browsers like Opera, Explorer, and Safari etc. The broader the range of cross platform compatibility the better it will be for your website.

Blogging is extremely popular these days. And the most popular stand-alone blog engine isWordPress. It is flexible, has many useful featires and there is a lot of eye-catching templates for it. But those who have a WordPress blog must be aware of a serious problem that can cause your blog to be removed from Google’s search results. The problem is: Duplicate Content.

WordPress content management system which, when used with the default configuration, is not duplicate content proof. In fact this CMS is capable to render almost 100% of your content duplicate. As usual the fault of the system has roots in its advantages. WordPress has many features facilitating blogging and linking, such as RSS feeds to posts and comments, trackback URLs, monthly archives and so on. In the same time this variety of URLs returning similar or identical pages represents a clear case of duplicate content.

WordPress And Duplicate Content

The first evidences of duplicate content produced by your WordPress CMS can be found in your sidebar. They are category pages and monthly/daily archives. Category pages store your articles posted under the same topic — a category. Such pages have no unique content; they are just a collection of your previous posts. Monthly and daily archives also simply group your previous articles by the date of posting. Sometimes when you have only one post in a given day, the archive page for the date and your post are totally identical.

The next case of duplicate content is even more prominent. It can be your home page itself. If it contains not excerpts but the full text of your posts, then it duplicates your post pages. This also applies to the “next/previous entries” pages — those accessible via /page/2, /3, /4 etc.

• Feeds. Search engine spiders crawl all the content they can reach and of course this includes RSS feeds too. The additional problem with them is that Google may choose to display your RSS URL in the search results over the link to the original post. In this case the user who clicks this result will see an XML formatted page which is not “human-friendly”.
• Trackback URLs. Many WordPress templates add trackback links after posts. This links enable authors to track who links to their posts. Usually, if your post URL looks like “www.yoursite.com/2006-11-30/yourpost/” its trackback URL will be “www.yoursite.com/2006-11-30/yourpost/trackback/“.
• Identical meta-description. By default WordPress doesn”t provide a tool to add unique meta description tags to your posts, and they either have none or share a single site-wide description. Having no meta description at all is a disadvantage, as a properly written one can make your snippet stand out in a SERP. Having an identical description for all your pages is a threat, as Google might get them filtered out as too similar.

Because of the duplicate content Google search can return less desired URLs (such as feeds or archives instead of original posts); your pages can be moved out of their index, or placed into the supplemental results, which are rarely displayed to users.

For tips how to get rid of the duplicate content in WordPress please refer to my tutorial: Making Your WordPress Blog Duplicate Content Safe