Content Management Systems
What does a content management system (CMS) do? It takes chunks of your content and pieces them together into a single HTML page. The other function of a CMS is to provide an easy way for the user to manage all those chunks of content. Managing content does not just mean allowing you to enter text or upload images; it also means making it easy for you to determine the relationships between chunks of content. Selecting a category for the article you are working on; for example, tells the CMS to assemble that chunk in a particular way when someone on the Internet requests a page on your website.
All of this is accomplished without the user having to know HTML coding. We are always being told to embrace change. One of the advantages of a website utilizing a content management system is that it allows you to change things as much as you want, as often as you want. The advantage of using a CMS instead of manually creating manual or dynamic web pages is that the managing of change is much easier and quicker.
WordPress as a CMS
Even if you get the bit about dynamic thinking and managing chunks of content, you might still be asking yourself how WordPress fits into the equation? Yes, WordPress is a blogging software but its structure is geared up to be used as a content management system. But I don’t want a blog, so why would I choose WordPress for my website? Part of the answer is that you could use any CMS to build any website; it’s a matter of how much work it would take to do it, how much customization, how much training to use the interface in a way it was not intended, and so on. The rest of the answer is that WordPress’s design – the simplicity and the flexibility – make it an ideal CMS for a huge variety of uses. Yes, there will need to be creative thinking, sometimes add-on software (plugins), sometimes customization of the coding, but if that weren’t needed, we’d be talking about a custom CMS for every website.
The point is that all websites have a lot of common elements that may have different names and different functions, but from the standpoint of HTML coding they operate in basically the same way. For instance, I need a photo gallery and a special archive page, If a gallery and an archive page are the chunks of content, all we need the CMS to do is assemble our chunks into whole pages. Your header and footer may be very different than ours, but we both still need a header and a footer. The CMS doesn’t care about the look and feel – it assembles and manages, just like WordPress.
Tags: Dynamic, Header, homepage, Post, Web Design, WordPress
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