Known only to true geeks and web development companies before the year of 2000, the content management system has been increasing in popularity since web blogs have come about. But what exactly is a content management system, how do you know when you use one and how do you know if you need to use one?

Apparently, this question is hard to answer by most designers (sorry friends). It’s amazing to see how many people can’t define a CMS (content management system for short) and how many people are surprised to hear things like “WordPress IS a CMS”. So before I go any further, I want to break this myth: WordPress can be used as a CMS.

WordPress is already a CMS, in fact, it always has been one.

I feel a lot better. Thank you. Now let me explain…

Using WordPress.org’s own Codex Glossary: A Content Management System, or CMS, is software for facilitating the maintenance of content, but not design, on a web site. A blogging tool is an example of a Content Management System. See also: blog. Content consists of text, images, or other information shared in posts. This is separate from the structural design of a web site, which provides a framework into which the content is inserted, and the presentation of a site, which involves graphic design. A Content Management System changes and updates content, rather than the structural or graphic design of a web site.

Thank you WordPress for defining that for us. So basically, content is any data or information, not structural design. This means images used for aesthetics is not content while images used for describing text, used as marketing tools, used in place of text, etc, is content. This means that basically all text is content, aside from navigational text, though it can also act as content (especially for search engines). This means that this entire article, all the text you see clumped together to your right and the page title is all content. (Pretty proud of myself for having a 99.9% content site actually…) You see the line extending vertically to the right of this article? That is not content, that is structural design and in a CMS, it would not manage that, it will not let you change the color from silver to black. A CMS will not let you change the background color normally. A CMS will allow you to edit text, post some images, create pages, etc.

Guess what WordPress does everybody? It edits text, adds pages, lets you post images, etc. It cannot inherently change the design of the site. There is no “change the background color of my site” button in the administration panel.

WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger.com, Facebook, Myspace - all content management systems. Neat huh? The founders of social networking sites built their own site to be a huge content management system, and each person is a page they added dynamically when you joined. Now here’s the bad news, if you didn’t know this already and are still fooled by gimmicks telling you “how to vamp up your WordPress to turn it into a CMS”, you have some development learning to do. I only say this because, if you want WordPress or other such CMS to just manage your content, you wouldn’t want to vamp it up more anyway. If you want to vamp it up, then you’re hoping to use it to create a vast web site or resell the use of it to a client.

Shame on you, WordPress is not a good choice then my friend. Go ahead and Google “problems in WordPress” and you find yourself with nearly two million results, many of which in forums and entire web sites.

Common issues:
1. Has known issues with handling lots of queries to its database
2. SEO-related issues
3. Usually forces the user to know how to develop code to do any good amount of re-structuring, upgrading, changing providers, or manipulating server files such as .htaccess
4. Constricting development tagging system

No CMS is without its bugs, but if you want to do anything remotely neat with a CMS, choose others. Here’s a good list: Joomla, Mambo, Movable Type, and Light CMS. All of these are great for resale, can handle large amounts of visitors to your site, have a lot of neat features and are just as easy to use - if you’re going to get your hands dirty, you might as well do it with a great CMS.

You could write your own too, but you might as well sign your life away for at least half a year to make a decent one that would be usable for clients across an entire web site.

Yes, I am using WordPress for this blog, but if I could do it all over again I would have chosen Movable Type. Granted, all this blog does is post articles, so WordPress is perfect. For my site, and others, I use other content management systems though. My portfolio site next year will be using a custom-built CMS, great for Flash, JavaScript and PHP integration. There isn’t a solution out there that works well enough, so heck, I’ll just make it myself! It’s better to do that than limit your web site or client.

“But Louisa, WordPress is easy for clients to use!”

Do you think clients knew what the “dashboard” meant before you told them? Have you tried to limit access in the WYSIWYG editor to a client by allowing them to bold text, but not use the strike-through? Didn’t even think about it? It isn’t possible. And what if your client wanted to change colors while editing content? You can’t allow them to. YOU can’t even have that choice.
A good CMS restructures administrative panels for clients, and different users, too. So please, for me, don’t use WordPress for anything other than content management. Do not build a large web site with it and please, don’t ever resell it for a client’s web site. It isn’t worth it.

Thank you.