Joomla - Content Management Systems Explained

What is a CMS?

CMS Stands for “Content Management System” and does what it’s called, it manages all the content for your website. A CMS lets you easily maintain (and build) your website with little or no coding experience, you can add, remove or edit pages, create different section for different topics on your website, etc. CMS’s usually use Templates which allow you to easily and quickly change the look of your entire site to a new “Template”. Another big advantage with most CMS's is that you can add extensions to them for different tasks that you might have, for example you could get a module that allows people to rate each of your articles. Extensions for a CMS are usually easy to install and make it very easy to increase the features and interactivity of your website.

Should you use a CMS?

Now the question is “Should you use a CMS?” and that’s a good question. CMS’s are good but not for everyone, they are better suited to content style websites where you will likely have a decent amount of content you would like to organize. If you are only wanting to make a small website with a few pages it may be simpler to just use a website builder. However if you are going to be making a content based website with a bunch of static content then a CMS is a great option.

Different Types of CMS’s

Look back several years and you would be lucky to find a CMS let alone one that is actually easy to use. Today there are many CMS's and more being created all the time, a lot are still very hard to use, others just don't have much functionality and some are just full of errors. So how do you know which one to use, well I have used quite a few CMS's and have found some that I like and of course my favorite one. There are 2 main CMS's that I like Joomla and Drupal. Now which one you use is up to you but I'll also add that my favorite one and the one I use for my website is Joomla, I found it to be the easiest to use and also have the most functionality, it has a massive following and new extensions are being created for it every day.

Also it is important to note that there are tutorials on setting up and learning Joomla on my website, everything you will need to know about using Joomla. Drupal tutorials may come some day, there won't be any at the moment, sorry.

All the different Joomla tutorials and information can be found on the left.