CMS: an easy way to manage a website
Let's say you have a business and you want to make a website for it. In 2023, there are three main ways to meet this challenge:
- Use a website builder. If you don't want to think about databases, code and hosting, you can register on the platform with a ready-made set of templates and just replace pictures and text in the right places. This is a great option for a business card page, a product landing page and many more complex solutions - website builders are very popular and easy to set up.
- Develop our own solution. If you have an unusual business idea tied to online, it will have to be implemented through development. This can be traditional programming using frameworks or No Code technology. The website is only one of the possible product showcases, other interfaces can be implemented as mobile applications or virtual slots for programs that interact with your product.
- Customize a ready-made CMS. Business processes have similar features, so there are already many ready-made boxed solutions that can be customized to suit the specifics of the business. It turns out to be more flexible than using the website builder, but not as expensive and difficult as keeping your own development team.
CMS is an abbreviation for Content Management System.
With the help of CMS, you can:
- create site pages without writing code;
- add and edit content: text, images, files;
- collect data on user preferences;
- create an online store, blog or any other type of website.
CMS market niche are small and medium-sized businesses not directly related to IT. To deploy the system, hosting is usually required, on which you need to install the appropriate software: the engine itself and the database, usually MySQL or MariaDB (read about databases in one of our previous articles). We will tell you about a simple installation option at the end of the article.
As for the price, most popular CMS are free of charge. Such platforms are developing thanks to paid technical support or paid plugins that expand the basic capabilities of a content management system. But there are also popular commercial solutions. Below we will look at some examples of CMS with numerous users.
Examples of CMS
WordPress
WordPress — is the most popular CMS. More than a third of websites on the internet use WordPress as a content management system. Due to this, there are free solutions for almost any task.
Pros:
- simple installation;
- easy to find a developer to customize the engine;
- great variability of templates;
- many web hosting companies support the engine.
Cons:
- plugins can be incompatible with each other;
- as plugins grow and are added, the work of a website slows down, but when configuring the caching system, you can work under high load;
- third-party solutions are not well tested for vulnerabilities.
Joomla
Joomla — another popular free CMS engine, a worthy alternative to WordPress. There is a template system, a security module for multi-level authentication and support for a multilingual audience. Joomla performs equally well on small pages and in large projects.
Pros:
- simple installation;
- a wide range of templates;
- a large community of specialists;
- API convenient for development.
Cons:
- there is no technical support from the developers;
- the site update requires checking the compatibility of plugins.
Drupal
Drupal — free CMS, which can be used for projects working with numerous requests. Thanks to the open source, the system is very flexible to implement your own solutions, and the structure of CMS itself can be used as a powerful framework for future development.
Pros:
- high performance and speed;
- excellent level of information protection;
- a large developer community;
- integration of modern development tools and practices.
Cons:
- high requirements for the hosting used;
- to get a working product, you need additional steps to configure the CMS after installation;
- high entry threshold for beginners.
Choosing CMS
It is better to decide on the choice of CMS beforehand in order not to make unnecessary expenses when moving between platforms. We made it so that all the listed CMS can be installed and tried through the ispmanager panel without unnecessary worries: you do not need to download archives and manually upload them to the server. And there is a two-week free access to the panel itself.
