What is CMS?

What is a CMS?

“A CMS or Content Management System is a computer application used to create, edit, manage, search and publish various kinds of digital media and electronic text.” – Wikipedia

How is a CMS site different from a regular website? To use a simple analogy, a CMS like a three-ring binder and a regular website is more like a bound book. Both contain information in an organized readable manner.

Take the book.
It’s got a beautiful cover, a table of contents, chapters and an index. Perfect.
But what if you need to update your book? You would have to hire a printer to revise and publish a new edition at considerable cost.

Take the 3-ring binder.
It can have a beautiful cover too. It’s got a few introductory pages, followed by tabbed sections with information. It can also have a table of contents and an index.
What if you need to update your binder? You make a new page, get out your 3-hole punch and place the page in the binder all by yourself. You can change the pages, the order, and the tabs, even put everything in a different cover when the original gets old. That’s your CMS!

A CMS has additional features too.
No software needed on your computer – it runs on Open Source (free) software installed on your website hosting server. You go online to make your updates – from any computer anywhere.

• Multiple author capability.
• Searchable content.
• Archive older content.
• Separate content from structure – want a new look to your site?  You can keep the content and change the “theme”. Choose from free themes, premium (additional cost) themes, or I can design a custom theme for you.
• Thousands of accessories (called plug-ins) are available to improve your site, such as photo galleries, contact forms and SEO (search engine optimization) plug-ins.

How are blogs incorporated into CMS sites?

As you probably know from your own web surfing, blogs are a great way to keep your readers, customers, and clients interested in what your website has to say.
A CMS such as Wordpress (one of several open source publishing platforms) incorporates a 2-pronged system of information: pages and posts.

Pages. Think of the intro pages in your binder. They contain mostly static information. Although changing it is easy, it’s best to keep it pretty consistent for your readers. Example pages are About, Services, Contact.

Posts. Think of the back of your binder – the tabs and information in each section. The tabs are your categories and the posts are the entries filed under specific categories. A category can have many posts. In a CMS, posts can be filed under more than one category too.

This is the method used for blogs. New posts are filed in the front of each tab or category or at the top of a category page – newest information first followed by previous entries. Reverse chronological order.

More info: Wordpress.org