Ever wonder what is a CMS and its advantages? Ever wonder whether your company should switch from using a traditional website to a CMS-driven website. Hopefully this article will give you some understanding about CMS, the differences between CMS and non-CMS sites and more.
CMS overview – From Wikipedia
A web content management system is basically a way of separating your visual presentation from your actual content – whether that content includes photos, text or product catalogs. This separation allows one to accomplish several key things, including:
Automated templating: Create standard visual templates that can be automatically applied to new and existing content, creating one central place to change that look across all content on your site.
Easily editable content: Once your content is separate from the visual presentation of your site, it usually becomes much easier and quicker to edit and manipulate. Most CMS software include WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technically trained individuals to easily create and edit content.
Scalable feature sets: Most CMS have plug-ins or modules that can be easily installed to extend the existing site’s functionality such as adding shopping cart, product catalog or chat functionality.
Lower cost maintenance: CMS hosted sites are often easier and cheaper to maintain.
Workflow management and version control: Workflow is the process of creating cycles of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in your CMS. For example, a user posts a story but it’s not published on the website until the editor approves it. The edtior then can roll back to a past version or roll forward to a later version if wanted.
CMS advantages overview
Using a CMS brings you many advantages in addition to easy maintenance.
CMS site
Non-CMS site
Easy site maintenance: CMS usually goes with a built-in WYSIWYG web editor and a built-in text editor. Depending on how technical you are, you can choose to use either one, and the result looks pretty much the same. However, CMS built-in WYSIWYG is often very rudimentary compared to other professional web editors such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver.
Not available. If you’re not technical, you’ll need to find/buy a web editor.
Simultaneous editing: You and your co-worker can simultaneously work on a web page without affecting each other’s work; you can edit the article asset, while your co-worker edits the link or image assets.
Not available. Text content, links, and images are all included in a single file. Two or more people can’t safely open and edit the same file at the same time.
Asset locking: While you’re working on an asset, the asset is checked out and locked; thus, nobody else can open / edit that same asset at that point in time.
Not available. Locking / checking out functionality is not available. Therefore, if you’re in the middle of editing a web page and another person in the team opens the same file to make some changes, chances are either your edits or your colleague’s changes won’t be registered.
Better version control: you can roll your asset back to an older version in the past; then you can roll that asset forward to the current version if needed. This helps minimize mistakes and accidental changes.
Not available
Better user control: Whenever an asset is edited and saved, a new version is generated with the author or editor information together with the date and time. You can immediately know what was done to an asset, and who did what and when.
Not available
Re-using asset or including asset inside another asset: If your website has a same right column on multiple pages, then whenever you want to add a link to that right column, you need to do it multiple times on multiple pages. Not convenient at all. A decent CMS will let you create one asset for the right column, then let you re-use through including it on multiple pages. Thus, you need to maintain only one asset, and when that one asset is changed, the right column will be changed on every page.
Only available if you’re using server-side coding like PHP, ASP… with include files functionality
Easy asset/site translation: A good CMS lets you handle asset translation pretty well. The system will display the correct translated version of the asset depending on which language and/or region the users have selected; extremely useful for big multilingual websites.
Doable but very cumbersome and not very intuitive
Setting asset date/time of expiration automatically: A good CMS also lets you set the start and end date of the asset. You can publish the asset now, but it won’t be visible until the set date and time, and it will be deactivated on the date and time of expiration. This is most useful with time-sensitive information such as marketing events, seasonal or promotional contents.
Generally not available. May partially available with server-side coding.
Convenient publishing without using additional FTP software: For a non-CMS site, when you want to publish your content, you need to move the new / updated file(s) to the live site. This usually involves using an FTP software to connect to your web hosting and transfer your file to the live server. A good CMS will provide you with a Workflow process in which you select the assets to be published and publish them all at once.
Not available
Again, hopefully this helps! Don’t forget to share your comment and/or question!
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2 Responses to About Content Management System – CMS
Drupal is very powerful. I think, if some one don’t mind to make their hands dirty by tinyrg to modify or write new code, Drupal is the best to create web pages.
Drupal is very powerful. I think, if some one don’t mind to make their hands dirty by tinyrg to modify or write new code, Drupal is the best to create web pages.
Pretty good content, especially the part comparing CMS and non-CMS site.