Content Management Systems

Inforest puts the power of creating and maintaining Web content in our client's hands. From editing Web pages, to maintaining product catalogs, to managing complex membership Web sites, we design content management systems (CMS) that are easy to use, fit the needs of our clients and can expand capabilities to meet their needs in the future.
Client control of Web sites is one of Inforest Communications core values, and we've been working with CMS for a long time.One of our first projects, Access Reports,
features content and document management systems for all site news, web pages and documents. For this small publisher, our custom CMS helps makes site updates fast and free of added costs.
Inforest Communications doesn't try and shoehorn a Web site into any particular CMS. While we maintain our own proprietary CMS for many projects, we are also actively developing projects with Open Source tools, particularly Drupal and Wordpress. We've also worked with popular Web editing tools such as Dreamweaver, Contribute and FrontPage, helping clients with training, developing templates and managing large Web sites. Inforest Communications goal is to find the right tools and the right CMS that fits the client.
Inforest CMS
In many cases, Inforest incorporates our own content management tools into our Web projects.  On a basic level, we've set up content editing on Web sites to include the ability to restructure site organization and navigation in addition to the ability to add, edit and delete individual pages and blocks of content using a built in WYSIWYG editor.  We've used the same framework for managing product catalogs, membership lists and other database dependent applications as well.  The key advantage being that we can very easily specify the information being manipulated and how it relates to other information presented on the site or contained in other systems.
The heart of this toolkit is a program class which can be configured to automatically associate data held in different database tables as well as generate data entry fields specific to the type of data being manipulated in the CMS.  In addition, a library of functions on the front end provide various means of displaying site information, from navigation menus, shopping carts, catalogs, press releases, etc.  Inforest CMS is written in the PHP scripting language and utilizes a MySQL database.
Drupal
The Drupal "Content Management Framework" is one of the more popular open source CMS offerings, and we have been excited to utilize for some of our projects. One could think of Drupal as a “Swiss Army knife” for Web site development, with the potential of having hundreds of specialized applications and tools to incorporate into a Web site. While unfortunately not always a “drag and drop” way of extending a site's functionality, Drupal provides a great starting point for building community driven Web sites and provides common points of integration for building complex sites.
Wordpress
The popular blogging platform, Worpress, is a full-featured CMS tool hiding in plain site. While not as customizable as Drupal, Worpress can be extended with plugins for forums, e-commerce and other capabilities.
Dreamweaver/Contribute
Adobe Contribute is a tool that provides a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor which allows for people to edit Web pages without having to know HTML.  Contribute can be used with its companion, Dreamweaver, so that Contribute can only be used to edit certain parts of a page, usually just the main copy.  Inforest has experience successfully setting up and working with these tools, this is our success is due in part to our expertise with Cascading Style Sheets, which help enforce consistency in typography and layout.  An example of a site that is currently edited with Contribute is http://www.glennparker.com/.
Microsoft FrontPage Integration
Another WYSIWYG editor along the lines of Dreamweaver is Microsoft FrontPage, which we integrated as the content management tool for the New Jersey Press Association (http://www.njpa.org/) during a 2003 site redesign.  Because FrontPage's capabilities to work with templates were extremely limited, we configured the Web server to pull the FrontPage edited Web pages into Web page templates dynamically.  The result is that FrontPage is seamlessly integrated into the site for editing content, ensuring consistent page layouts and no conflicts with other CGI scripting.
OtherThird Party CMS
There are many content management tools which are available for managing various types of Web sites, ranging from e-commerce frameworks to entire site management.  We've worked mostly with open source software such as Joomla, phpWebsite, OS Commerce for various projects.  While these tools can be extended to do many tasks, they are often to inflexible in the way they handle workflow and associate content for our projects. Thus we recommend working with our own CMS, or Drupal and Wordpress, when possible.