What is CMS in layman's language

CMS which stands for "Content Management System" is a software tool that is used to store and retrieve the web content

A high-level overview

CMS is used to manage the creation and modification of digital content (text, images, and video). CMS was been used for a long time (2000 - Drupal and WordPress) where PHP and database are combined to store web media content and display them easily with minimal expertise.

Back then building a website and maintaining the content requires coding knowledge, but to make this life cycle easier CMS helps with a nice User-Interface which gets the content to be updated from the users and stores them in a backend database(say AWS S3 bucket) which then display them in user's website.

Who, in 2023 has not updated the Facebook/ Twitter status? If you can do that, you can easily run an eCommerce website by updating the web content with CMS tools 😅

This makes CMS looks attractive to companies and freelancers to have professional-looking websites who don't have the technical expertise or can't hire a web developer

Some famous CMS software examples

1. WordPress: WordPress is the known first CMS tool that is based on the PHP platform. This tool is been used by a large population who create custom plugins and themes to increase the behavior of bootstrapped websites (open source)

2. Joomla: Open source CMS tool used by small/medium-sized businesses

3. Squarespace: Proprietary-based CMS tool that's widely used by non-tech professionals to build blogs and showcase websites

4. WIX: Cloud-based CMS tool that offers drag and drop interface with a wide range of plugins and customized stylings

Types of CMS

• CMS tools can be differentiated into 2 types based on where we store the web content

  1. Self-hosted CMS: Software that is installed and runs on the computers on the premise of the person/ organization using the CMS. This is completely owned, operated, and maintained by the user.

     • Pros - more flexibility and control (customization)

     • Cons - maintained by one person which requires to handle the updates, data backups and web content database security

  2. Cloud-based CMS: Software that is hosted on the cloud database and data is retrieved through the web browser

     • Pros - Less maintenance

     • Cons - Less control over the customizations (All cloud CMS websites look more or less the same and easily recognizable)

• Differentiated based on how data is rendered/retrieved from the database

  1. Traditional CMS: Includes built-in user interface or frontend for displaying the stored web content to customers. This handles both the content management and delivery process

     • Eg, WordPress, WIX, Joomla, Liferay

     • Cons - Most of the Traditional CMS don't offer to render web content in a Mobile app

  2. Headless CMS: Doesn't have a built-in frontend for rendering the stored web content to customers. This provides an API (Application Programming Interface) that offers developers to get the web content from CMS and display it on their coded front-end platform

     • Eg, Sanity.io, Strapi

     • Pros - Offers a high chance of customization for rendering the web content on its front-end platform which is tailored to their specific needs

Live use cases

• Many blog/ portfolio websites nowadays are based on CMS tools.

  1. Be it traditional CMS blogs - WordPress, Blogspot, Hash node, or Medium uses content management to store the user's blog content in markup(block content) files and displayed them in their in-built frontend which offers less customization in UI

  2. Technical expertise in APIs and query language can build their coded blog website from scratch by only storing the web content in CMS tools and displaying them in their frontend platform which enables highly customized UI to keep their blogs/ portfolio websites unique

     • My project and blog post showcase website uses sanity.io to store the web content and display them using Astro and reactJS - Portfolio site

• Websites which has application pages filled with forms have been built using CMS tools

  1. Lendingstream fintech site

  2. Drafty UK

  3. Walt Disney blog site

Outro

In simple, we can use CMS software to store our web content like images, videos, and text in their database and retrieve, and display them using in-built or other front-end platforms. Hope we could see many new features coming above CMS in the future ✌️

Leave your comments below and suggestion of new topics for blogs are appreciated 🔥

References:

1. What is a CMS? YouTube 📽️

2. What is headless CMS 📖

3. History of CMS