What is a CMS?
Ok, you’ve come to this site, so you very well may already know what a CMS is, but for those of you who are new to this concept, let me try to explain to you exactly what a CMS is and what makes them so great. To do this, I’m going to compare the old way of creating websites with the new, CMS driven method.
The Old Way
Back in the day, the web was just regular, static HTML pages. What this means is that every page you saw online was sourced from a single file, probably made by hand. This page would be the same every time you visited it, unless someone manually updated it. This was a simple enough model, but the problems with it became readily apparent. If you had a very complex site, adding a new page or section would mean that you would need to update the links and navigation for every single individual page on the site. Doing this by hand would be very tedious, and even having a script do the job is not the most elegant method. It was clear that a better solution would be needed,
The Newer Way
With many people growing tired of the limitations of static websites, many began to explore methods of dynamically creating pages as users requested them. For example, if a user on a cars website selected the “Ford” category, a page with a list of all articles on Fords would be created by a script, typically drawing from articles stored in a database. These sorts of systems allowed the content to be stored separately from the presentation parts of the website. Also, updating the content of the site was as easy as updating the appropriate section of the database. However, in the past, such system were often custom made, and not easy to use for the average person. Perhaps there was an even better way.
The CMS Way
Enter the Content Management System. A content management system makes it easy for the average person to setup and run their own dynamic website. A CMS simply packages all the functionality needed together in one easy to use package. There are usually two parts of a CMS, the front end and the back end. The front end is simply the website that your visitors will see, updated dynamically with your content from a database. The back end allows you to administer and write for your site. These back end interfaces are designed to be usable by your writers, making it easy for teams of people to update a website without having to understand the technical details of the site. This also makes it easy to change the look and feel of your site, while leave all your content perfectly intact. Many CMSs can also handle user contributed content, such as comments, photo uploads, and more. The possibilities really are endless. Read on through the rest of these articles to find out more on how you can make a CMS work for you.