Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software

Architecture Piece Parts at Enable Quiz

Content Management System (CMS)

Let's get into more detail concerning the components of the Enable Quiz architecture, starting with the CMS. Enable Quiz has a substantial user interaction component, and though it's not going to have as many pages of content as, say, a news website, it will have quite a few. So, they should probably use a CMS. Building the front end using a CMS may require more overhead up front for the developers, but it's worth it in the long (or even medium) term. The CMS implements an organizing hierarchy for all the application's content, maintains a consistent set of visual templates, and provides an easy-to-use graphical front end for editing content. The bottom line is that you won't have to pay or wait for a developer every time you want to modify something on the site. And it will keep the front-end content consistent and organized.

Figure 4.4 Content Management System

Many CMS's exist. Joomla! is one popular choice with lots of circulation and support, which is particularly important since it's open source. Open source means the product's source code is publicly available, and in Joomla!'s case, many of the software's updates and enhancements come from a community of volunteers. Unless the people building the Enable Quiz site have a strong feeling otherwise, Joomla! is probably a fine choice in this area.

Though ...