Part One: Why use a CMS?
There are nearly 75 million WordPress sites live on the web. That’s nearly 16.5% of all websites. Drupal and Joomla are the second and third most popular content management systems, meaning that at least 21.4% of websites now run using a CMS released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The impact of this shift in the world of web design and development towards free software has gone largely unappreciated. With the GPL as the new standard in content management systems, a lot of web designers are hesitant to endorse the use of this software. Although there are many reasons for this, the main ones seem to be an uneasiness surrounding open source code, and hesitation to adopt new practices to reflect the changing environment.
I’m going to assume that some of you probably don’t know a lot about CMS software, or about the GPL. For those of you who are already familiar with these things, a brief rundown of them will help to clarify why I think WordPress is so important and such a great utility.
Most sites don’t use a CMS, but there are many benefits to using one. From the perspective of the end user, a CMS enables you and your staff to easily make substantial modifications to your website without coding or contracting a web designer. From the perspective of a web designer, a CMS can be sold or included as “added value” that also makes your job easier. It eliminates the need to offer constant support for basic changes to the site content. At the same time, the client may pay residuals for support and updates, meaning you can still bring in revenue without having to do nearly as much work. Good CMS software is a “win-win” for everyone.
However, there are still many reasons that most sites don’t use a CMS. For one thing, simply using raw code without the interference of a CMS allows you greater control over the site’s structure and functionality. If you use a CMS, you are effectively married to any limitations it may have. A good CMS will make most tasks easier, but they do sometimes complicate things if you want to implement a more advanced site feature.
Another downside of a CMS is that accessing and modifying code may be simpler without one. WordPress, for example, uses PHP, which is a fairly advanced scripting language to begin with. What’s more, the PHP code in a WordPress site makes several calls to unique WordPress functions, meaning that you also have to learn how WordPress works if you want to edit PHP code for it. If you need to keep very close tabs on the back-end structure of your site, and you don’t know a lot about PHP, but do have at least an intermediate knowledge of CSS, HTML and JavaScript, then WordPress might not be for you. Every CMS has some limitations, and the decision to use one always means a trade-off for back-end usability.
READ MORE IN PART TWO
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