Things You SHOULD Know About CMS

1K Blog Marathon: Day 45

Are you a web developer? Do you create website for your clients? Or do you want to create your own website?

Whenever you’ve heard it or not, I think you should know a little bit or more about CMS. But what is a CMS, by the way?

The What?

A CMS or Content Management System is a software that makes the creation, building, updating and managing of a website easier for the user without having to code from scratch. It allows faster update and designing, publishing and creating contents with the help of drag and drop, WYSIWYG or by means of plugins. Simply put, CMS allows YOU to create a website EASILY!

Case Scenario

Imagine you are creating you website from scratch. After you’ve done coding – perfected your tags (HTML), added your styles (CSS), and behaved according to your scripts (JavaScript), you are now ready to kick it off!

Then you think that you should have a blog on your website. So you create a page, added your contents – texts, images, videos and links – and then kick it off again. The next day you add another blog post. So you create, add contents, and kick it off. Again. And again.

That’s a too tedious task!

Enter CMS

With CMS, you have a front-end user interface that allows you to add new blog post, drag and drop objects like image, paragraphs, headings etc. This is called CMA, or Content Management Application. Did I tell you that you can do it absolutely with little to no coding at all? It’s like you’re using MS Word!

Another part of CMS is the CDA or Content Delivery Application. CDA is the back-end of your website. It compiles and updates your website according to the changes you made from the CMA.

Logic of CMS

Unlike traditional websites that stores pages in HTML or PHP files, CMS uses database to store contents. For example, you have a 1,000 blog posts. In a traditional sense, it means you have a 1,000+ HTML files. But by the approach of a CMS, the contents of each blog posts is stored in a database. So instead of 1,000 files, you have a home page HTML file and a database with a thousand of items. Easy right?

Also, because your contents are stored in a database, you can perform faster post search by indexing it.

By using the front end of the CMS, you have a dashboard of anything that can be used to customize your website, like adding logo, changing themes, fonts and colors, which will be uniform on the whole site – you don’t have to “include” it on each page.

By means of buttons, you can Create, Publish, Update and Delete pages and contents.

Is CMS for me?

Honestly, as a programmer, it’s a little butt hurt to use a CMS when I can code from scratch. But as I’ve said earlier, using CMS saves you a lot of time creating your website. Even if you’re a programmer, if you want to focus on creating good contents, instead of coding it you can use your time for research and learning your topic, like what I was doing!

And if you’re a content creator, blogger or a business owner, using CMS removes all the difficult, time and resource consuming development. You can focus more on providing values and good contents to your audience!

Popular CMS out there

1. WordPress.com
2. WordPress.org
3. Joomla
4. Drupal
5. Magento
6. Ghost
7. Wix
8. Squarespace
9. Shopify
10. Zesty.io
11. Typo3

Choosing whether to use or not a CMS is your choice. And if you do decide to use it, leave a comment on what Platform works best for you!

“And that’s one blog, stay hungry!”

“If you’re already a front-end developer, well, pretend you’re also wearing a pirate hat.”

― Ethan Marcotte, Responsive Web Design