What is Content Management System?
Content Management System (CMS) makes website creation easy. Creating a website before the content management system needed you to understand HTML and CSS. Depending on the complexity, further knowledge of other languages may be required to make the whole website function together.
CMS now powers more than 46% of websites around the world. From small companies to big firms, they all use CMS. It now facilitates creating, editing, organizing, and publishing content without much of you being a coding geek.
The Content Management System is somewhat like a ready-to-cook meal.
There are two types of CMS, ECM for Enterprise Content Management and WCM for Web Content Management.
An Enterprise Content Management system aids in organizing, collecting, storing, and access to information. It’s dynamic, allowing customization based on business needs. You can learn more about ECM on aiim.org.
A Web Content Management system explicitly handles web page creation, maintenance, reassembling, etc. Click here to learn more about WCM in detail.
Basic features of CMS
All CMS comes with essential functions and features to get you started. If you want to add more than these, you can install plugins.
1. Content Management
The ease of editing, updating, and managing content is one of the reasons why the software has been such a hit and adopted by the online community. It comes with a WYSIWYG editor, which is similar to MS Word.
It provides a non-tech way of creating new pages, adding bold, italics, hyperlinking, and more without knowing any HTML code. The created page sits in the central repository. It stores all the content and provides additional valuable details such as:
2. User Management & Rights
The CMS comes with user management features, making tracking the users on your website easier. It also gives different permission levels to provide appropriate rights to the user based on their role.
3. Easy to modify designs
CMS makes it easier for you to redesign your website. The content and design are separate.
Customizing is much easier for a non-tech or tech guy without writing tens of lines of code. Implementation of design sitewide or on a specific page is comparatively easy to a traditional website.
4. Backend & Frontend
The CMS comes with a backend and a front end. If you create a dynamic site or create any, you know it is an additional and considerable cost.
The backend has an average learning curve, depending on your chosen CMS.
Popular Content Management System
There are tons of content management systems. We have listed the top four content management systems.
WordPress
WordPress is a content management system with more than 50% market share. It has a decent learning curve. In addition, its flexibility makes it popular among website builders.
It has the largest community, with 45,000 plugins and 2,100 themes, free. So it gives users a lot of options.
WordPress is powerful for creating all kinds of websites, including blogs, eCommerce, business, and more.
It is the most search engine-friendly CMS out there.
Joomla
Joomla is a popular open-source CMS with a 6.7% market share. It is a powerful and flexible option with a large community of helpful members. Joomla is a bit more challenging as it has lots of options. However, these overwhelming options make it more powerful than WordPress.
Joomla has become search engine friendly with time, but it still has many catch-ups to do compared to WordPress.
Check out the official site of Joomla.
Drupal
Drupal is for advanced users. It has about 2.3% adaptors worldwide and powers various personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites.
Drupal has 1.3 million+ community members. It has 30,000+ extendable modules and 2,000+ themes to build the website.
The community is very active, which means support isn’t a problem.
Magento
The list would have been incomplete without mentioning Magento. Although Magento has been made for e-Commerce only, it is more specialized and a favorite among developers building websites for their clients.
The biggest issue with Magento is the development cost is high. It has some big brands as its clients, like Nike and Cort.
