In the previous article, the question was raised about which engine is best to choose for the site , and you probably already understood that the engine for the site is not just a separate entity that we create or choose without regard to everything else (features and tasks of our project ). In terms of software CMS content management system , this is not just a program for convenient filling of the site, preferably with unique text content , this, in fact, is your site.There is some confusion in terms here. Some experts prefer to decipher the abbreviation CMS - as a "content management system", this is a more popular formulation. And this happens because, in fact, the CMS is both the "engine" of your site and the program for filling it. Actually, as you already understood from the title of the post, I propose to call the CMS nothing more than a content management system.
As a rule, such systems are equipped with a graphical web installer, which allows a beginner without special knowledge of web technologies to install a CMS, create a website and concentrate, for example, on writing articles. Most CMS require the web server to support MySQL databases. So the content management system predefines the structure of your new database and takes on several functions at once.
What can content management systems do?
The Content Management System (CMS/CMS in Russian) manages the various components of a dynamic website, namely, it is responsible for displaying the menu, site pages, and also provides a convenient interface for creating new pages, menus and for changing the site design. Ideal for a non-coding person - no need to edit the page code to change a menu item or add text. Page output - everything happens automatically, the changes made will be displayed on all landing pages. When adding or editing a page, you only care about the text, while your CMS takes care of the layout, appearance, styles, and fonts. It is clear that the appearance of the site can also be changed using the control panel, moreover, with a couple of mouse clicks - install the theme and you're done. It’s quite another thing to adapt this theme to your site, but that’s another “song”.
But do you need to methodically learn web technologies to work with CMS? I do not urge you to strive not to learn the basic bundle of HTML + CSS + JavaScript, ignoring such knowledge will eventually lead you to the fact that problems with the CMS (and there can be a lot of them) will play a cruel joke with you over time. You wanted to create a website simply and without problems, but in fact it turned out that you spent hours “Google” on the topic: “How can I change the background color in the selected topic?”, Or “The template floated, how to properly center the news block?”. Although I don’t like those who “beat on the hands with a pointer” to beginners, but if you seriously decide to engage in website building, then I think you need this minimum.
What are content management systems?
The topics of comparing CMS systems in terms of quality characteristics are very popular on the Internet, but I will list only a few - open and free systems, it seems to me, are the most attractive for a novice site builder. But open source CMS and extensions for them have many problems with security, with code validity, with regularity and timeliness of updates, but for a novice developer, all these shortcomings are often offset by one main advantage - accessibility. DRUPAL, JOOMLA, WORDPRESS are, in my opinion, the brightest representatives of the conditional category “simple and free”. There are systems that are more difficult to master - MODX and TYPO3. I note that many of these solutions are considered CMF - frameworks for designing and creating CMS content management systems, but it's too early for you to think about the details of this issue. Many experts call these systems “pop”, but do not confuse all of the above systems with various website builders, blog services (Google Blogger, LiveJournal), social network accounts. We will talk about these and other CMS systems for professional website development separately in one of my future articles. With this post, I am finishing a series of articles on the initial theoretical foundations of creating a website.