Content Management Systems
Why a CMS?
HTML was originally designed as a means of sharing and linking together individual documents. Plain HTML is still adequate for simple documents, but it is very limiting as it means a new, separate document has to be created for each new page or article. By keeping the content of a website in a database, and using a pre-built system to manage and display this content, it is easy to build and run large, flexible and maintainable websites.
A website using Drupal as its CMS has four main components:
The details of how these components interact and how they are configured isn’t that important at this stage; the benefit of a pre-built platform that we are going to use is that this is taken care of to begin with. Other CMSs work similarly, but with different components, such as .NET/Ruby/Java/Javascript for the backend language, or PostgreSQL/MongoDB for the database.
There are lots of choices when it comes to CMSs; we could build our own, or we could use one that has already been built. Using an existing CMS means we can very powerful systems without having to do nearly as much work. The code has also been tested thoroughly and we can get access to a whole community which offers loads of add-ons and support. Other developers who come along after us to update sites will also be familiar with the structure.
Different CMSs can be good for different things, take a look at some of the different CMSs out there:
