What is a Content Management System (CMS) ?

You have probably heard by now that Caravel is a CMS, or Content Management System. What does this mean? Simply put, a content management system allows you to easily create, maintain and update content for a website.

What Caravel is not

Caravel is not a program that you download and run on a Windows or Mac machine. It is run on linux webserver, but people can use Caravel from their browser  (i.e. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome etc.) without ever downloading or installing anything.

Want to run your own personal Caravel installation?

If you are a linux user interested in running your own personal installation of Caravel you should go to caravelcms.org.

Want to know more about Content Management Systems?

For more detailed information see the wikipedia entry which provides an excellent overview of the various functions a CMS provides.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

Who can use Caravel?

Anyone with a computer capable of running a modern web browser, ideally Firefox should be used for editing webpages, but Internet Explorer, Safari and Google Chrome all can be used to view Caravel sites.

What can you do with Caravel?

All the kinds of things that you can do on a website. Blogs, forms, video, audio, rss feeds, but also maintaining files and information for users.

What should I do first to get started?

There are lots of ways to get started, feel free to continue to browse learncaravel.org and try the demo site out once you feel you have an idea of something you want to try.