What percentage of website owners think that a good CMS boosts website’s content structure, flow and output?92%
92%
Content Management System (CMS)
Content Management System (CMS) is a software or a suite of applications deployed to input and manage content on a website seamlessly.
It is an interface or a medium for the creation, edition or modification, review and publishing of material on a site and enabling multiple users to upload content at the same time and work collaboratively on the website.
CMSs are typically used for enterprise content management (ECM) and web content management (WCM). An ECM facilitates collaboration in the workplace by integrating document management, digital asset management, and records retention functionalities and providing end users with role-based access to the organization’s digital assets.
Content Management System (CMS) is a software or a complete package of applications installed and deployed to manage content on any website effortlessly. The interface helps to create, edit, review and publish content on a website. The platform also helps multiple users to work together and upload the content at the same time.
CMSs are widely used for web content management (WCM) and enterprise content management (ECM). ECM provides the end users with a role-based access to the organization’s digital assets and brings collaboration in the workplace by integrating digital asset management, document management and records retention functionalities.
On the other hand, a web content management facilitates website authoring, collaboration, and administration tools to manage web content.
ECM mostly includes a WCM publishing functionality, however web pages of ECM remain behind the organization’s firewall.
Know In-depth!
Essentially CMS is an interface for the management of the content of a website.
Both enterprise content management and web content management systems have two components: Content Management Application (CMA) and Content Delivery Application (CDA).
Content Management Application is a front-end graphical user interface (GUI) used to add, modify, remove content from a website even with limited expertise and without any knowledge of HTML. The CDA component provides the back-end services that support management and delivery of the content once it has been created in the CMA.
Content Delivery Application compiles that information and updates the site.
CMS Come In All Shapes And Sizes
CMSs come in all shapes and sizes, each with its own set of features and benefits.
Some are ideally suited for blogging; others may be tailored to e-commerce sites with features for pricing and accounting functionality. Specifics will vary based on the company’s needs and resources.
Points To Consider While Selecting A CMS
Answering the below questions can help you select the right content management system for your business or organization.
Does the CMS has APIs and Supports Integrations with other Apps and Microservices?
Whether you want to incorporate personalization to your marketing strategy or want to get deep insights into your users’ web interactions and behaviors, businesses, like partners and marketing, require very different apps and microservices to manage their day-to-day work on the website.
Marketing demands a solution that can easily integrate with marketing automation tool, business intelligence tool, Google Analytics, and RSS to deliver personalized content. Partners need to connect with devices like the partner management platform, such as NetSuite, to better manage partner alliances.
Pick a CMS solution, that has robust APIs and lets you easily connect with third-party tools.
Does the CMS provide a high level of Customizability?
The best CMS platforms are highly customizable. That means they enable you to add almost any feature you want, which in turn enables you to create more advanced websites.
Does the CMS provide Page Editing Functionality?
You will need to create various types of pages for your website. Your CMS should provide you with the tools you will need to get the job done.
Does the CMS provide Content Taxonomy options?
The more content the website has, the more important it is to keep everything organized. That’s why a CMS should enable you to create categories, assign tags to your articles, and so on.
Does the CMS support Omnichannel?
Even if your business is currently only leveraging desktop or mobile sites, it’s important to consider other properties that you haven’t, yet, looked into, but could benefit from in the future. Currently, content exists in the form of AR/VR, mobile, kiosks, digital assistants, jumbotrons, and so on, and there is no sign of this slowing down in the future.
How Easy is it to Create and Edit content?
The larger the company, the more removed the end user of the CMS will be from the person who implements it. Ideally, the system will be easy to use and intuitive, with features like a WYSIWYG editor. The CMS should provide a way to easily publish new content. Any quality CMS will include a powerful editor, and plenty of options to make sure your content looks top-notch.
How large is the Developer Community?
Some of the CMS platforms, particularly WordPress and Drupal, come with very large developer communities. The advantage to a sizable community is the amount of online help and documentation you will find on most aspects of customization. CMSs with active communities are under constant development, so you will always have access to updates, security patches and help from other knowledgeable people.
How many different Groups Of Users will there be?
One consideration will be the various different levels of administrative privileges that are required. Consider the various user roles, including the role of managers in reviewing scheduled content.
Is the CMS Intuitive?
Having a user-friendly interface is especially important if you have a team that won’t be living in the system every day. They’ll need a solution that is easy-to-use, not require a lot of technical know-how or training and can quickly pick it up when they log back in.
Is the CMS Scalable?
Scalability should come as a no-brainer. Change is inevitable for any growing business, and changes impact your websites. Make sure you choose a CMS solution that can quickly grow and scale as needed.
Is the platform SEO-Friendly?
If SEO is important to the company, you will want a CMS that automatically handles basic on-page optimization tasks such as title tags, URLs, alt tags on images, and a sound internal linking structure.
What Business Operations does the CMS need to Support?
Does the company need to publish hundreds of new videos a day? Change prices on thousands of SKUs per day? Host images for blog posts? CMS will have to factor in all these questions and address them.
What is the kind of Budget that you have?
If you have more budget then you can afford very complex content management systems with features designed to make content creator’s and editor’s lives easier.
What Technologies does the CMS need to Support or Integrate with?
If the company already uses a CRM, ERP or web analytics program, you will need to consider a CMS that integrates with existing online marketing and other software.
CMS Examples
There are plenty of options when it comes to picking a content management system for a development project.
Depending on how advanced you need the CMS to be, what language it’s built in, and who is going to be using it, it can be a nightmare try. However, some CMS have a slight edge over the rest of the competition because of the usability of the software. Some are just easier to install, use and extend, thanks to some thoughtful planning by the lead developers.
While there are hundreds of CMS platforms, some of the more popular ones are listed below:
Drupal
Drupal has a very large, active community. Instead of focusing on blogging as a platform, Drupal is more of a pure CMS. A plain installation comes with a ton of optional modules that can add lots of interesting features like forums, user blogs, OpenID, profiles and more.
It’s easy to create a site with social features with a simple install of Drupal.
In fact, with a few 3rd party modules you can create some interesting site clones with little effort. One of Drupal’s most popular features is the Taxonomy module, a feature that allows for multiple levels and types of categories for content types. And you can find plenty of professional Drupal Themes, which are ready to be customized and worked with.
You can also grab Drupal Plugins. Drupal also has a very active community powering it and has excellent support for plugins and other general questions.
Joomla
Joomla is a very advanced CMS in terms of functionality. However, getting started with Joomla is fairly easy, thanks to Joomla’s installer. Joomla’s installer is meant to work on commonly shared hosting packages and is very straightforward considering how configurable the software is.
Joomla is very similar to Drupal in that it’s a complete CMS. It comes with an attractive administration interface, complete with intuitive drop-down menus and other features. The CMS also has great support for access control protocols like LDAP, OpenID, and even Gmail.com.
The Joomla site hosts more than 3,200 extensions, so you know the developer community behind the popular CMS is alive and kicking. You can add just about any needed functionality with an extension.
WordPress
The PHP blogging platform is far and away the most popular CMS for blogging, and probably the most popular CMS overall.
WordPress powers around 60% of the entire web. It’s a great platform thanks to their excellent documentation and super-quick installation wizard.
Five minutes to a running CMS is pretty good. Not to mention the fact that the newest versions auto-update the core and plugins from within the backend, without having to download a single file. For those users not familiar with HTML or other markup languages, a WYSIWYG editor is provided straight out of the box.
The backend layout is streamlined and intuitive and a new user should be able to easily find their way around the administration section. WordPress also comes with built-in image and multimedia uploading support. WordPress has the widest base of plugins and themes to choose from.
A great part about the WordPress community is the amount of help and online documentation you can find on nearly every aspect of customizing WordPress.
If you can dream it, chances are it’s already been done with WordPress and documented somewhere.
WordPress is a free and open source WCMS based on PHP and MySQL. WordPress can be utilized as part of an internet hosting service (WordPress.com), or it can be deployed on a local computer to act as its own web server (WordPress.org). It is immensely popular amongst the blogging community.
WordPress allows users to have full control over the files, documents, as well as the design and display of the content. You don’t have to know a single line of code to publish content using WordPress. The beauty of a good content management system is to allow any user to create and manage their content without any technical know-how.
Although it is mostly used for web publishing, it can be used to manage content on an intranet, or in a single computer.
You can use WordPress to power –
Blogs
Static websites
eCommerce stores
Forums
Membership sites
Online courses
Portfolios
Social networks
Etc.
Other Important CMS
Alfresco
Blogger– Google’s blogging tool designed specifically for maintaining a blog
Personalizing digital experiences is all about content management.
Your CMS is a live stage where you are continually creating dynamic interactions between the data that you collect about visitors and how you structure and serve content. Content personalization(or customization) is a strategy that relies on visitor data to deliver relevant content based on audience interests and motivations.
It ranges from a highly targeted call to action to a revolving landing page based on geographic or industry-specific segments. Any data you have access to about the user, the content, or the outside world can be used to personalize a page. Personalization is done through Personalization Rules and Components.
The most common personalization rule matches something on the User with something on the content.
Types Of CMS Based On Processing
A WCMS can use one of three approaches: offline processing, online processing, and hybrid processing. These terms describe the deployment pattern for the WCMS in terms of when it applies presentation templates to render web pages from structured content.
Offline Processing
These systems sometimes referred to as ‘static site generators’, pre-process all content, applying templates before publication to generate web pages. Since pre-processing systems do not require a server to apply the templates at request time, they may also exist purely as design-time tools.
Online Processing
These systems apply templates on-demand. They may generate HTML when a user visits the page, or the user might receive pre-generated HTML from a web cache. Most open source WCMSs support add-ons that extend the system’s capabilities.
These include features like forums, blogs, wikis, web stores, photo galleries, and contact management. These are variously called modules, nodes, widgets, add-ons, or extensions.
Hybrid Processing
Some systems combine offline and online approaches. Some systems write out executable code (e.g., JSP, ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, or Perl pages) rather than just static HTML. That way, personnel don’t have to deploy the WCMS itself on every web server.
Examples of popular License/Hosted CMS solutions include:
IBM Enterprise Content Management
Kentico
Microsoft SharePoint
Pulse CMS
Sitecore
Shopify
SaaS (Software As A Service)
Additional service charge
Doesn’t require programming
Free hosting
Unable to migrate
PaaS (Platform As A Service)
API-enabled
B2B CMS
For large corporate use
Linked with others
Difference Between CMS & Website Builder
CMS’s manage the website’s content, such as blog posts, and you can add a theme on top of that management system. When you deploy the site using CMS the process usually looks like this –
Purchase domain name
Choose hosting plan
Point domain to the hosting plan
Install the CMS (or request installation)
Choose or upload theme (edit if you want)
Purchase add-on services and products separately
Set up CMS (add plugins, create navigation, add SEO settings for the SEO plugin of our choice, create users, set up permalinks, perform backups, set up security, etc.)
Start creating content
Website Builders can include blogs, but their focus and strength are in providing the tools to build the website. Such as a frontend visual website building interface. When you deploy the site using the Website Buildersthe process typically looks like this –
Create an account
Choose subscription
Choose a theme (edit if you want)
Choose or add domain
Fill in the SEO settings
Start creating content
CMS Advantages
Choice of hosts.
There are tons of themes and plugins to choose from.
They can be used to create any type of website imaginable for any size audience.
You can build with a standard theme or use a builder and create our own layouts.
CMS Disadvantages
Possible compatibility issues.
Some are not intuitive.
Support comes from various services you purchase separately.
You are responsible for all maintenance.
Website Builder Advantages
A website can be set up quickly and easily.
Ease of use.
Support is readily available
You don’t have to worry about maintenance, security, backups..
Website Builder Disadvantages
Customizations are limited.
They’re not suited for all website needs.
You can’t move the site to a new host.
You might not own the domain.
Important Advantages & Dis-Advantages of CMS & Website Builder Tabulated –
Service
Website Builder
CMS
Advantages:
Ease of use.
Speed of website creation in a visual editor (from several hours and up to a couple of days).
Technical support provided by web developers.
Extensive opportunities of creating different types of websites, ranging from blogs and up to online stores.
Rich choice of extensions for advanced functionality.
Website editor available in visual and HTML regimes, which allows users to learn HTML basics.
Disadvantages
Serious restrictions in editing website code structure.
Inadequate multi-functionality (as compared with CMS)
Inability to transfer a website to another hosting or website builder.
Necessity to learn programming languages to interact with the system, including template change, addition of new widgets etc.
It is a user, who is responsible for the condition of the system, its safety and updates.
We Meet Publication/Client Requirements
We architect the Content Management System for our clients depending on the publication requirements.
Some of the essential features that we deploy in the CMS are:
SEO friendly URLs of the web pages.
Online help.
Group and user functionality.
Support for changing template designs.
Installation of various wizards and their up-gradation.
Audit logs & all other features as required by the client.
