CMS is the acronym for “Content Management System.” The objective of a good CMS is to make it easy, a little fun to add and manage the content of a website. It is very important to understand the basics about how your CMS work.

Some popular CMS are Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.

Think about Content, not ‘Pages’

When we browse a website, we tend to think that we are moving from page to page. Everytime the screen reloads, we’re on a new page.

This analogy to books has some good points, however you will have to drop it if you wish to wrap your head around building a website. Books and websites are two different technologies. 

Mostly, in books, the content of each page is different from each other. The only thing that is repeating is the header and the footer. Writing a book technically means assembling a single stream of words that will begin on page 1 and will end at the back cover.

Just like in a book, a website has header and footer too, but its has a lot of other elements: menus, sidebars, article listings and more. 

These elements are separate from the content. Imagine if you need to create those elements all over again in every page.

CMS lets you focus more on the content. You write your article, then upload it to your website and the CMS will spit out a nice page that contains your article and the menus, sidebars and other elements.

Make many paths to your content

In a book, every piece of words basically appears once. Most of the time, you will begin at page 1 and read it until you reach the end. This is a good thing. No website, or even ebook reader can provide the chance for deep, sustained concentration you get once you hold a book. That’s what great about books.

With that in mind, most of the books doesn’t have to provide many paths to the same content. They have a table of contents and index. However, many people are going to read the book, thus these are not the main focus.

Websites, however, typically feature articles or maybe short description of the content that may be read in any order. A blog could be written in chronological order, but readers may land on random post.

It’s not enough to just post your content. You also need to provide many ways for you audience to find what they are looking for. This includes:

• List of recent articles. You can also put some teasers or short description to introduce the article.
• Category or tag listings.
• List of related articles.
• Syndication: an RSS or Atom feed.
• An archive by date.

All of those things needs to be updated every time you post. Just imagine doing all of those things manually. Isn’t it very exhausting and a waste of time?

That what makes CMS very helpful. You just need to upload your article, add some tags and the CMS will handle the rest for you. In an instant, your new article will appear on all those listings and your RSS feed gets updated. Other CMS even notify search engine about your new post. All you need to do is just post your article. Isn’t that much better and easier?

A good CMS makes life easy but you do have to learn a little

CMS is a labor-saving device. But you still need to learn a few things about it in order to make use of it. If you’re managing it by yourself, you may need to learn some arcane rites to install it.

Many web hosts provide one-click installers. Eventually, you will want to create a copy of your website so that you can test new designs and upgrades. You may need to learn the manual installation.

You will need to learn about software upgrades. Developer will keep adding improvements and fixing security holes in the code, thus you need to keep your copy updated. If you don’t do that, your website will get defaced by some automated script.

An effective CMS makes upgrades easy, however you might still need to do them.

There will be times that you may need to test the upgrades on a private copy of your website first. You need to be careful not to make any changes that would make future upgrades difficult.

Even if you pay a developer to take care of these tasks on your website, you may still want to learn the strengths and use of your chosen CMS. This will make you confident as you post and manage your content. In addition, the more you know about the features of your website, the more ideas you’ll get for your website. So make some time in learning your CMS and the payoff will be bigger than you think.