What is CMS software in the first place?

CMS stands for Content Management System, and for the purposes of this article we will be discussing website content management systems. Web CMS software allows you to easily and efficiently manage a website and all of the associated text, images, and other files without having the technical knowledge of web programming. That being said, as a person who does possess the technical skills of a web developer, I wouldn’t even consider foregoing the great benefits of a CMS for the nostalgic joys of manually managing a website and its content. A CMS (when properly configured) essentially provides a framework for a website, providing templates and tools to quickly and simply create new pages, or modify existing ones, while preserving the design aesthetic of the site.

How Does it Work?

A CMS provides both a front-end, and a back-end view of your web site. The front-end pertains to the normal visitor’s experience of your web site — viewing the pages, clicking around to navigate the site structure, and perhaps filling out forms to submit or search for information. The back-end is the administrative experience whereby an authorized site administrator logs in to a password protected section of the web site in order to manage the content. Through this magical back-end interface, a normal human being is miraculously empowered with the skills of a full fledged web developer, able to publish beautiful web content instantaneously for the wide world to see.

Separation of Content and Presentation

The CMS software is installed on the web server and connected to a database also hosted on the server. Content and “metadata” (formatting instructions and other content-related attributes) for the website are stored in the database. The CMS contains a “presentation layer” which consists of templates specifying the visual appearance of the site. When a user visits the site and looks at a page, the CMS software finds the appropriate content in the database, the appropriate visual template, and fills the template with the content. This independence of content and presentation is powerful and allows for the look and feel of an entire site to change simply by modifying a few templates. The template-based system also means that a site with thousands of pages can exist with one (or a handful) of templates to define the appearance. The pages do not actually exist on the web server — rather, when a visitor views a page, it is assembled in real-time by the CMS software pulling the appropriate content from the database and populating the template with this content.

Thousands of Content Management Systems… How Do I Choose?

While there are thousands of CMS platforms, all with similar features and functionality, they are certainly not all created equal. Many CMS platforms are not well supported, documented, or maintained. You see, a CMS is actually a living, breathing, dynamic entity just like the Internet in which it thrives. The popular CMS platforms are often open-source, meaning that an entire community of developers are constantly honing and upgrading the core CMS software to best serve the changing needs of the web. A properly installed and maintained CMS should be regularly updated to take advantage of new features, and to comply with the latest security recommendations (indeed, with millions of users and websites using a particular CMS, there are hackers trying to find ways to break in and exploit the software). At MB/I, the two preferred CMS platforms are WordPress and Drupal. Both are powerful, well-supported, open-source content management systems. Between the two systems, we have been able to satisfy a wide array of client web needs.

Let us know your preferred CMS?

Contact us to discuss how WordPress or Drupal can be used in your online business strategy.