Content Management Systems
What is a Content Management System? A content management system (or CMS), simply put, is a system that allows you to manage the content within your website. Talk about rewording a phrase. Maybe you're wanting something a little more in-depth? Essentially, a CMS is a software that can be integrated, or built for, your specific website and allows you to manage all of the content on your website. You can easily edit all of the information dealing with any page on your website using a CMS, and the best part of a CMS is that it allows anyone, with or without the knowledge of programming languages, to achieve that which, until content management systems, only web programmers could do!
Why use a CMS?
Deciding to employ a content management system on your website will probably be one of the best decisions that you'll ever make. If employed correctly, a CMS will allow you to create, edit, and update anything within your website. With a CMS anyone can easily add text, videos, and pictures to a website as well as new articles, blog posts, and pages.
Obviously, when I use 'anyone' I don't mean 'anyone' in the sense that any Joe Smoe could connect to your website and change all of the content. That would be a horrible thing! Content Management Systems are very well protected and are just like any other software that requires an account and password. If one wanted to connect to the CMS to update the website, then that individual would need to have the website administrator's username and password. Hopefully that cleared up any questions concerning my using 'anyone' in such context.
How is a CMS employed?
A content management system can be employed in a number of ways. There are two major ways that web developers can create a CMS for your website. A web developer can either use an open source freeware content management system, or develop a content management system from scratch to fit a specific website's needs.
Shall we delve a little deeper?
Open Source Freeware CMS
An open source freeware CMS is exactly what its name entails. It is free, and its source, or coding, is open to editing. Sounds great right? An extremely complicated software that is both free and editable! Well, I'm going to have to agree with you one this one, it is definitely great. The Web Development Community is very charitable and they offer a plethora or freeware softwares and open source applications. Firefox is a great example of one of the largest freeware and open source softwares available to anyone and everyone. Now a possibly better example for our case would be Joomla, the largest open source freeware CMS available today. There's definitely a reason why it's so widely known and used as well, and that's because it works.
Just as one might assume, with anything great there are always some negative aspects. Joomla, although widely known and used isn't perfect for everyone and isn't one hundred percent customizable, however it is extremely customizable and can fit a majority of everyone's needs. In these cases, a specifically designed and developed content management system would be better suited. Another downside to Joomla is that it still has to be customized to the specific website that it is going to be employed on. This is a fairly obvious one, however it is extremely important. As every website is different, Joomla must be customized to each individual website's design, layout, and needs. This can be a somewhat timely process, and a bit frustrating to get working properly, however it is always well worth its price and is much less expensive than the other alternative.
Specifically Developed CMS
A specifically developed content management system is very customizable as it is made from the ground up. It is a very timely project and a specifically developed CMS can become quite expensive. If a website can be created without the use of a specifically developed CMS, then it most definitely should for multiple reasons inlcuding time and most importantly the cost of the website.
A specifically developed content management system is, truly, a program. Content management systems can be developed using a variety of programming languages such as PHP and RoR. The latter is less commonly used, however I like it more than the prior. As a specifically developed CMS is a program, it can easily cost thousands of dollars to design and develop.
If you would like to get some more inforamtion concerning specifically developed content management systems, then please don't hesitate to send me a message. You may email me at tyleranderson@andersonwebs.com or you can use this website's contact me form.