What is a Content Management System and what do I need it for?

When trying to run a website on your own, especially without any or much technical experience, you'll likely stumble upon the term Content Management System or its abbreviation CMS. A CMS, as the name already suggests, is a full featured system that helps you write and mange almost any form of content (e. g. texts, images and videos).

While there are a lot of CMS available out there which have a lot in common they all aim for the same goal. Providing a (mostly) easy to use system to deliver content without the need of any technical experience. Therefore most CMS, if not all, provide a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that can be used to publish content as easy as possible. A WYSIWYG editor basically shows you the content you're creating in its actual form and how it'll exactly look like when it's published.

Thus using HTML markup which requires a little more technical knowledge is not necessary anymore. So as you can see the editor provides a more elegant and pretty easy to use way to create content.

<h1>That's a simple headline</h1>
<p>Some plain text followed by an image</p>
<img src="some/img/url">

Alright, but why do I need a whole CMS to publish some stuff? I have basic experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so I can publish all my content myself you may ask. Well, nowadays the internet is pretty dynamic and changing really fast. Not everyone is able to keep up with all those new technologies and stuff being developed. Therefore a CMS provides a pretty solid foundation for websites with content and people without the need of extraordinarily functionalities since there are teams behind those systems developing them further and fixing potential bugs and security issues. Additionally, a CMS doesn't only provide a way to create your content, but also a way to show that content off when published. You don't have to care about a layout of your website - the CMS takes care of it! Furthermore, since content can be anything, for example like product information, there are also other use cases for a CMS such as a web shop. Therefore a lot of CMS provide various plugins and add-ons to achieve that and run parts of the system as a web shop. However, you can of course do adjustments on many parts of a CMS and customize a lot of things to your needs.

Well, isn't that something everybody would love to use? The short answer would be yes. Actually a lot of individual people and companies are using a variation of a CMS in order to deliver content to their users. It's often a lot easier and cheaper than developing something that's exactly tailored to your needs, thanks to all those plugins and add-ons. Moreover you often don't need a fully technical background to operate a CMS - except of the initial installation. Basically everyone can create new content easily.

While traditional CMS are a well known part of the internet and widely used for blogs and personal websites (such as Wordpress), and you're able to add a web shop to your blog through add-ons like WooCommerce, there are also a lot of other CMS (so called shop CMS) around the corner focusing on that niche such as Shopify and Shopware. Beyond that, especially in recent years, a lot of other CMS forms popped up on the marked.

But more on that in another article ...