Content Management System (CMS): What Is It and How Does It Work?

The emergence of various engaging websites paved the way for the development of powerful organisational tools such as the Content Management System or simply known as CMS. CMS evolved as a substitute to older tools used to manually create content, offering huge convenience to all sites and content-producing platforms.

Through CMS, users can now publish content on their websites quickly and easily, even without technical expertise.

Despite being popular as a software tool with user-friendly interface that often include a set of free templates, there are important things you ought to know if you’re eyeing to add CMS solutions to your website or digital platform.

The Backbone of Content Management System

As a tool for content modification and management, CMS helps website owners and content creators produce content without the need for manual coding.

Website owners and creators work easier and quicker as they can focus more on the public-facing side of the website rather than spending extra effort in handling data, storing images, and performing content-related tasks.

Availing a CMS system for your website is easy because you have plenty of options to choose from. The difficult part is choosing a system that will work best for you. Some of the most popular content management systems today are Wix, Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, among others.

Wix is a widely used CMS application for building websites that integrates social media and blogging features. It also offers numerous premade templates for any kind of website. Wix includes typical set-up guides for selecting and creating websites from various templates and designs, and help features for uploading content.

Drupal is a web publishing CMS software that also enable users to build tools within the platform to help manage content. With its advanced administration capabilities, users have a great deal of flexibility as well as superb management permission.

Joomla is a developer-friendly, comprehensive content management platform suitable for any website. Users can access solid built-in features that utilise the MySQL database system for data storage and highlights multi-language support and easy use of plugins.

WordPress is one of the world’s most popular CMS platforms known for offering tons of features and flexibility for curating content within a website. With a content management system like WordPress, publishing desired media are done in an interface as easily as writing in a rich text editor such as Microsoft Word.

How does CMS Work?

Creating a website manually can be exhausting especially when there’s tons of content to manage. Without a helper system in place, a developer must write the website code (such as a static HTML file) and upload it to the server. A complex process like this can cause difficulty in publishing and maintaining a website.

While most of the content management process is done from the back-end side of a website, the CMS is not merely an “input gateway.” It also previews content for creators so they have an idea of how users will see them when published.

In building a personal website, most content management systems are a good choice especially for those without prior experience in building one. Users can use CMS to create any form of websites, ranging from static sites, social networks, e-Commerce stores, blogs, and so on.

The general process flow looks like this: purchase desired web hosting and domain name, install preferred CMS system on the web server, configure website settings through the CMS platform to customise the look and function of the website, and write content by utilising the CMS interface.

It’s also easy to make other changes on the site. You only need to navigate to the admin panel section where you can install extensions, change permalinks, and more. Changes such as editing paragraph formats, inserting new copy or media, are made in an intuitive interface, which showcases the CMA or content management application in action. End users will see no code, just an interface where changes are easily done.

Before the website content becomes available for any external user to see, a portion of the CMS called the CDA or content delivery application will first have to take the content you entered in the CMA or templates, store it, and update the website. In this state, the data is “floating” until you commit to finalising it by hitting a command such as “publish,” which confirms the input of all the copy, media, and back-end accessory data (such as alt tags).

To put it simply, the content you publish is saved in the server-side before it becomes visible, making it easy to amend it before publishing. Of course, you can still edit the content after publishing, which would be a massive revision task if you do not have a CMS platform installed.

Conclusion

Working with a CMS app is surprisingly very simple. Of course, in today’s digital realm, convenience through innovation is definitely the name of the game.

If you’re looking for a trustworthy developer who can handle CMS, Singapore based mobile app and web development agency: FRONTLINE, speaks for itself. Known as Frontline Mobile Pte. Ltd., we are a company specialising in cutting-edge digital solutions ranging from content management systems, usability testing, and web and mobile app development.

If you want to know more about how we can help you and your CMS (content management system) endeavours, please click https://www.frontline.com.sg/contact/.