CMS - What's the low-down?

Wordman-GL wrote:
> I've been researching Conten Management Systems out of curiosity and the desire
> to learn more about all things web-design. Well, I remember when I got my first
> web authoring software I was slapped in the face with the cold-hard fact that I
> really ought to manually code my pages and not use the WYSIWYG editor. I hated
> the thought, but have come to embrace manual coding completely.
>
> SO...
>
> I see that Joomla and other CMS can actually 'create' web pages and add new
> pages to your existing site. Um, well...does the CMS create code? If so, is it
> clean code or does it suffer from extraneous extras as we see in web editing
> software-generated code? And what about style sheets? I spend a lot of time on
> my sheets...what does the CMS do about this?
>
> And lastly, if CMS are so great, hell, Joomla is FREE...why do we need to
> spend $$$ on Dreamweaver?
>
> I'm curious to know what's the real deal. If a CMS can help me, I'm all for
> it, but I don't like the sounds of them generating pages for me. The potential
> for botched code makes my skin crawl.

Joomla doesn't create code, it displays data on your page in a format
that you predetermine from the configuration of the link. It may "look"
like a page, complete with page name, but thats a clever bit of code
using the PHP mod_rewrite engine to take a nice looking name and turn it
into a querystring which the index.php is configured to read and spit
out the page. Thats how many CMS's work.

The page output is based on a template, if the template is coded right
by you then it will have a nice clean output, but if its coded badly by
you then its nasty output.

Dooza

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