What is a CMS? Content Management System

Website creation

We mentioned it in the introduction: creating a website involves various technologies, both for the generation of HTML pages, and for the storage and access of resources used by them (such as images or documents to download).

A content manager or CMS allows the creation of a website without the need to know any of these technologies or, at most, basic knowledge related to editing web pages. Mainly, those related to text formatting (bold, italics, links, etc.).

When creating a website with a content manager, such as a CMS, it allows you to separate two aspects that, from the user’s perspective, are integrated: the design or visual aspect and its content (both text and images).

In a CMS, design and content are independent. This means that the design of a web page can be changed without affecting the content, which continues to be displayed adapted to the characteristics of the new design.

Although CMSs allow design elements to be introduced within the content, they should be avoided as much as possible, since a design change could mean going through all the content to remove or revise those elements.

Therefore, one of the first tasks with a content manager is usually to define, select or design its visual appearance. What in the WordPress content manager, for example, is called “theme” or “theme”, although different Web CMS can use different nomenclatures.

Once a design or theme has been chosen, the CMS provides us with the available templates for this theme and, through the manager interface, we can enter the contents that will be displayed in the spaces reserved for this purpose in those templates.

Website management and maintenance

In most cases, a website is not a static entity, but grows and evolves over time, either to include new web pages with more content, to modify existing ones or create an electronic commerce.

Even websites, such as corporate ones, which, in principle, we can assume will have few changes, usually have a news section or customer testimonials that should be updated with some frequency.

Through the CMS (content management system), performing this update or maintenance of the content only requires locating the template or type of content that you want to create or modify, edit the content as appropriate and save it, almost as if it were a document in a word processor.

On the contrary, if a Website CMS is not used, depending on the complexity of the changes, it may be necessary to hire a professional to make these small changes directly on the HTML, CSS or JavaScript code of the pages.

Likewise, the management system offers various utilities to organize the web pages and easily search for the contents of the website, through a simple and intuitive interface, without the need to locate the physical files on the hard drive or to know the real structure in which they are stored. They are stored.

The same consideration extends to the rest of the resources they use (images, documents, videos, etc.): the CMS manages and stores them for us, and we only have to search for them and select them when we need them.

The versatility of the CMS is such that, in reality, there is hardly any differentiation between creating a web page and updating it: everything is done through the same interface (that is, menus and web forms) and the same utilities.

CMS Website Administration

At the moment that we are using an additional tool to manage a website, a new configuration layer is added to manage its functions and capabilities, in addition to other aspects related to its operation.

In principle, these characteristics are independent of the site itself and its content and describe how it will behave or be managed as a whole. For example, in the case of web administration, what will web addresses look like, how web pages are organized, or how images will be stored.

On the other hand, the content manager itself, like any other computer application, also has its own configuration and administration options, related to its operation. For example, the language of the user interface, the date formats or, a very common feature of CMS that we will see later, which users can manage and with which profiles.

Likewise, we will also see that content managers allow their functionality to be extended through plugins or add-ons that, in turn, must be configured and managed, also through the same manager interface. In general, the default configuration of the CMS is valid for most websites, especially small ones.

However, at the time our features are added to the web through plugins, or it is intended to optimize some specific aspect of our site (for example, for the ), then the configuration must be carefully reviewed to adjust it as best as possible.