CMS: Everything You Need to Know

If you blog, work with marketing, or have experience with content savvy organizations, you have probably encountered a CMS.

Try to think about what you really do. If you’re responsible for content, most likely you write copy, upload a picture, and fill in some metadata. Then you either publish the article or send it to approval, in line with the principles of content operations.

Maybe you also rearrange elements on the website, like the order of articles or what to feature on the front page. Or perhaps you maintain the employee profiles, adding new pictures and updating the biographical information.

If you are a site lead, you may work with an overview of articles, where they are placed on the website, what permissions users in the system have, and what third-party integrations are allowed. If you’re a blogger, you may just make content and hit “publish”, and that’s it.

Either way, you expect the CMS to do your bidding, you expect it to be flexible and reliable, you expect it to simply work. No matter what task you have in mind: Content organization, media repository, URL structures, SEO tactics, design elements. You name it.

You rely on certain features to work not just by themselves, but also in harmony and unity with the whole system.

In our definition we listed several features you usually find in a content management system. Now we will treat these properties in more detail. We’ll start with the one feature most people are familiar with: the text editor.

• See also: Page-oriented vs. content-oriented CMS »

Text Editing

At the heart of any CMS lies the text editor tool. Like its pure counterparts in the operating systems, the CMS text editor has grown to have a lot of strong features. In the days of yore most text editors required you to write in code, like <bold>this</bold and <p>that</p>. However, with the rise of the WYSIWYG editors, however:

What
You
See
Is
What
You
Get

Instead of endless amounts of unreadable codes, you get the “finished” product with formatted text, images, lists, videos, embeds, headers, paragraphs, quotes, superscript, underlines, links, etc. This is both user friendly and effective. It removes obstacles from what really matters: creating quality content.

Of course, this has been the industry standard for decades and might seem like a banality to mention, but you shouldn’t forget history or what really lies beneath the surface.

Many CMSs let you switch seamlessly between a WYSIWYG (pronounced approximately like “we see wig”) editor and an HTML editor. But a few has locked the editing to the visual level, for reasons of e.g. keeping to strict brand guidelines defined by the webmaster or the developers.

Some CMSs even present you the text editor in close semblance to the actual finished product, so it feels like you are editing directly on the web page. Others may require basic HTML skills and only allow an HTML editor.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Text Editor Types

There are advantages and disadvantages with both types of editors. A WYSIWYG editor makes it a dream to produce content.

It may be the best option for corporations that want to limit the inclusion of certain risky elements like unwarranted code, images, or the like. However, this may limit your work and the toolbar may lack options for simple features like tables, superscript, quote formatting etc.

An HTML editor gives you full control over the output, but takes it for granted that you know some basic HTML. Like how to format properly and how to write the code for links and images.

What you should look for in a CMS is a text editor that suits the needs of your organization. If you are a small or medium sized company, a hybrid text editor may fit you perfectly.

If you are a giant, international corporation, a strict WYSIWYG editor with limited choices for a broad range of users might better comply with brand and security standards.

Media

After basic text editing, the handling of images and other rich media files are probably the most common task performed in a CMS. Who doesn’t want gorgeous pictures brightening up their content, making their website more colorful, and breaking up the monotone walls of text?

Beginning with basic images, again think about what tasks you usually solve with pictures in a CMS. You don’t want your website to look dull and boring, so adding a little color and breathers is most likely your and your organization’s basic motivation for including images in the first place.

Of course, you also may want to illustrate the related topics or even difficult concepts touched upon in the copy.

An image is usually used in two ways in a CMS:

1. The image is placed directly in the given page, either through the text editor or as a fixed page element/module etc.
2. The image is linked to the page through metadata outside of the content in the article

These two methods are not mutually exclusive, in fact most CMSs uses both ways simultaneously. The first method is fairly easy to understand: You want an image here, after this paragraph, so you just insert it.

The second method is for a more indirect use of the image, and most commonly refers to the so called “featured” image. This is the image you want to connect to an article through search results on the website. It may also work as a preamble/preview in modules fetching content on e.g. topic pages or the front page.

This second method may also dictate what image you see on top in the template of the article itself, as opposed to images you manually put in via the text editor or the like.

Another aspect to consider about images is the management and organization of your growing collection. Once more, this touches upon a two fold approach to image handling:

1. You upload the image directly from your computer, the Internet etc.
2. You fetch the image from your archive

In either method, you end up stuffing your CMS archive full of images. As this will always be the case, you should enforce a logical and user friendly naming convention.

Other Media: Video, PDF, etc.

Although images play an important part of any CMS, they are far from the only media type available on the world wide web. In fact, videos are an increasingly popular medium, due to the availability of platforms like YouTube and the enthralling nature of the moving pictures themselves.

Videos can be a great way to educate and entertain your target audience. But they can be more time consuming and often require more planning and logistics than simply taking a photograph.

Your organization has to find out whether or not videos fit your target audience or buyer persona, and then plan and execute accordingly.

Videos can be uploaded locally or embedded through platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.

Embedding videos from a third party is the easiest way to integrate videos with your CMS, but as you have no control over the service, you are not guaranteed that the video will always be available when you prefer.

In this case you should consider using a tool like Qbrick, which allows you to upload videos to the cloud and still decide the look and feel of the video player.

Other kinds of documents, like PDFs, presentations or spreadsheets, are usually uploaded to the CMS via a media uploader wizard.

Then you link to the given document in the text editor via an ID or URL function, where you browse your media depository just like with images. Embedding is also possible here, for instance via services like SlideShare.

Naming conventions and file size best practices also apply to these kinds of media, as much as they do to images. Be sure to have a logical system and keep those file sizes down!

Publish Dates

If content is king, then timing is queen. Together, this royal couple can make or break a content strategy. As you probably would have the king and queen make your strategy a success rather than a failure, you not only need to pay attention to content, but to timing as well.

In other words, publish dates.

Back in the old days all kinds of organizations controlled when their ads, marketing material, and information brochures were distributed. When content was sent out with the postal service, when it was displayed in the newsstands, when invitations to events were distributed.

This need of timely control has not evaporated with the emergence of digital technology. Today management of the content’s timing is more crucial than ever, in a world where the Internet flows over with content.

You need to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.

Hence, most content management systems give you advanced control of drafting, publishing, unpublishing, republishing, on and off times, as well as detailed control over the publish date down to minutes and seconds.

Being able to plan and schedule content in the future enables you to have a steady flow of content. For instance a predictable schedule on a blog, making the experience smoother for the consumers.

It is also nice to have the ability to schedule content at a point of time when nobody on your team is available, but when your readers are most ready to digest it.

On and Off Time

While most of the aspects of publishing might be self explanatory, a feature like “on and of time” might not be.

This function decides when a specific piece of content will be available and when it will not. Say, for instance, that your task is to organize dozens of events, and every event has its own page.

Instead of manually returning to each event when it’s too late to sign up, you specify when the article will be unpublished, i.e. when it will expire or be “turned off.”

Another example may be a seasonal event, say, a branded summer campaign. It makes no sense that this is available during the cold winter months. Through the CMS you can decide that the page will be “on” in May, June, July, and August, while it will be off in the remaining months.

See also:

• 5 Content Studio features you didn't know »
• Publishing power! Enonic Content Studio cheat sheet »

User Roles

Most organizations have a hierarchy. That is a structure where members are ranked above, below or at the same level as others according to relative status or authority.

A CEO is higher in the hierarchy than a janitor, and the former has more executive power and insights into all the statements and records of the organization than the latter.

The transferring of this principle to a CMS makes sense: Some coworkers have more responsibility than others, and yet others have a specific, technical function no one else in the organization can replace.

A person hired to write copy should not have access to change the structure of the website. An editor should not have access to change the codes behind the website. And a developer should have full access to all levels to code and quality check the test results in all facets.

Any CMS with respect for itself and the security of its customers have the possibility to manage users and roles. Roles vary depending on your needs, but common roles include:

• Administrator
• Editor
• Author
• Contributor

Your chosen CMS should provide you with an overview where you can fully control who gets to see and do what tasks in the system.

Who has the right to change code? Who has the right to rearrange the page hierarchy? Who has the right to only write articles? The user role control panel should help you decide.

See also: What is a customer data platform?

Revision and Version Control

You discover a most grievous mistake in one of your articles. A paragraph with well written and thoroughly reasoned arguments have accidentally been deleted.

And worse yet: The content was deleted several days ago! If this was the late 90s and your software was a text editing program, your carefully executed lines of text would now be gone forever.

Enter the new millennium, a time and place where you can undo these kinds of subversive mistakes with a beautiful thing called “revisions.”

With the advent of services like Wikipedia and Google Docs, a version history is now always present. Every time you save changes in Wikipedia or do anything in a Google Doc, the system saves the previous version. At the same time it both saves and publishes the new and current version.

Make sure that your CMS includes this feature, as you always can go back in history to find a given edition of your content.

Revisions are an inbuilt security mechanism for your content, and ensures that you never lose progress. It is also a form of audit, which you can use to quality check all published content over time and observe what actually did occur in the past.

In some ways revisions are audit logs in a way similar to blockchain technology, where all transactions are automatically stored in nodes for everyone in the network to see and verify.

Version Control: Is It Published or Not?

Publishing and bringing back lost content is one thing, but knowing and having full control over live versions and changes to it is another matter.

When you have published content in some CMSs, all the following edits are made live on the fly. But what if you want change certain elements, but postpone the publishing to a later date?

There is a difference between saving and publishing/updating your content, but not all content management systems take this feature into account.

If this is an important issue to you, make sure your chosen CMS includes the possibility to not only publish and saving changes to published content before updating live, but also to make this distinction crystal clear to you in the user interface.

Accessibility and Usability

Accessibility is the principle that sight or hearing impaired people should be able to see and hear the contents of your website and navigate it easily.

The more people who can consume your content, the merrier. The same principle applies to your content editors: the more who can use the CMS, the better.

If the CMS fulfills accessibility standards, it also enables any person to contribute to your website.

One well-known accessibility standard is WAI-ARIA. This is a technical specification by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), specifying how you can increase the accessibility of your web pages.

Certain functions of modern websites with dynamic content and advanced user interfaces are not available for people with disabilities. For instance, people who rely on screen readers or who cannot use a mouse might have a hard time navigating certain websites.

This is where standards like WAI-ARIA come into the picture, to help you helping your audience.

There is, however, a divide between what you see externally on your website and how your CMS looks and feels “internally.”

As this is a page about CMS, we concentrate on the latter. How accessible is your CMS, and how easy is it to use?

Accessibility is often connected to usability and user friendliness/user experience (UX).

Some general UX principles to consider in your CMS include:

• Minimize the number of options available for users
• Incorporate auto save functionality and robust error handling
• Provide task based interfaces
• Hide technical details from end users
• Provide efficient user interfaces
• Provide help and instructions
• Minimize training required
• Support self sufficiency
• Present the CMS in a logical organization
• Have clear and easy to understand iconography
• Enforce logical and neat naming conventions
• Provide thorough documentation
• Be aware how third party software affects your CMS organization

Of course, a lot more could be said and written about UX. You should see this as a start, and not as a detailed investigation about how you can think about usability and accessibility in your chosen CMS.

Now, near the end, an important question arises: what CMS should your organization choose? There are literally hundreds out there, so how do you orient yourself in this seemingly confusing maze?

One obvious starting point is the list of content management systems on Wikipedia. This list is quite technical and is primarily aimed at developers, so be sure to involve your more technical proficient colleagues if you want to read it closer.

• 7 signs that it’s time to change your CMS »
• 5 pitfalls when changing CMS »

Another tactic in your strategy to find a suitable CMS is to use Google and search for keywords you and your team values along with “CMS.” For instance: “headless CMS” or “flexible fast easy CMS”.

Use your time and be patient, do not pick the first nice looking content management system you happen to stumble upon. Note the properties of the different systems and weigh the pros and cons against each other, all according to what your team and organization need and want.

WordPress Versus the World

If you go and check out the statistics of the most popular content management systems, one CMS in particular stands out. You have probably guessed it already: WordPress sits on the CMS throne with a whooping 51 percent of the market share.

What does WordPress offer that makes it so appealing to so many actors across the world wide web? Here are some WordPress features:

• Does not require specialized knowledge about code or web design
• Fairly easy to set up and maintain
• The user interface is easy to understand
• WordPress is both a blog host (.com) and a blogging software (.org), with the former introducing many potential users for the functions they can continue to use if they decide to go for the latter
• Plugins provide a solution to many different needs that WordPress does not offer in its core package
• A sea of different themes lets you handpick the design you want
• Active community keeps the development alive

There is no doubt that WordPress is a popular and user friendly platform, but a whole host of eCommerce sites, businesses, and larger organizations use other content management systems. Why is that? This might be due to WordPress having some shortcomings:

• Security – WordPress offers plugins to do just about anything you can think of, from changing database parameters and altering JavaScript codes to offering SEO tools and email forms. Most of these plugins are developed by third parties, both companies and private persons alike. They pose a threat to the general security of your site in two ways: 1) All plugins have an extra set of codes that can disturb or ruin some function of your website, and 2) All the extra code basically builds new doors to your stone wall that is the core CMS, allowing malevolent actors new potentially weak entryways into your kingdom
• Customization – Although WordPress offers themes, making your website look and feel as you wish, they do not alter the core of the system. WordPress offers little customization in its core functionality, despite the outward appearances and features that you can change with themes, widgets, and plugins. As we have seen, third party elements like themes and plugins pose an unnecessary threat, something businesses cannot tolerate. The lack of customization therefore makes brands and larger organizations choose solutions they can tailor together with dedicated consultants from scratch, fitting their exact needs and in compliance with risk guidelines

Don’t get us wrong. WordPress is an ideal tool for blogs, personal websites, and small scale websites.

But every tool must fit its purpose.

Just as a carpenter would never use a wood screw in a concrete wall or vice versa, you should not select a solution that doesn’t fulfill your organization’s requirements of scale, flexibility, security, performance, and so on in regard to your digital experiences.

Essential Features for B2B, SME, etc.

So, if you work in business to business (B2B) or a small or medium sized enterprise (SME), what should you look for in an alternative to WordPress or your current CMS?

We have written this entire guide explaining just that.

But, since we are the good guys, here are the most important essentials repeated. This is what you should look for in your next CMS:

• Hybrid CMS – Need a traditional or headless CMS? Why not choose both, when (and if!) it suits you, in the form of hybrid CMS?
• Supported – Is the CMS actively supported by the developers or an external agency? Do your research and ask around, they are probably eager to answer your questions.
• Scalable and modular – Try to understand how the CMS works at the core. Will it be able to add functionality and modules, as well as trim off unnecessary parts if needed?
• Responsive – No matter how or when you edit content, you should be able to do it on any device and on any bandwidth
• User friendly – Keep in mind that your CMS should be easily understood and easily handled by your users, with a focus on logical navigation, accessibility functions, and so on
• Marketing friendly – A modern CMS with respect for itself incorporates tools that makes engaging with customers and the target audience easier, namely marketing automation, SEO, personalization, content marketing, and collaboration tools
• Revision and version control – Never lose a day’s work (or a minute’s, for that matter) with revisions and have a full overview of what you show externally on your digital experiences with version control
• User management – Who has access to what? Any CMS that takes risk precautions provides you with a clear overview of users and user privileges
• Future proof – Take an extra look on the developers behind the CMS: Are they an open source community? What frequency is the CMS updated at? Does the developer / vendor / support seem stable and long term? Does the CMS support a long term customer journey? These factors will give you a clue if the CMS is future proof, and therefore worth investing in for you and your organization.

See also:

• Why your CMS is the most valuable tools for your customer journey »

CMS Alternatives for B2B and SME

There are several giant CMSs / WCMs / DXPs out there, like Adobe Experience Manager and Sitecore. These solutions offer tons of features and functionality, and are primarily aimed toward large, multinational corporations that have other needs than small and medium size enterprises.

These needs include a website hierarchy across the globe with content inheritances, large and dedicated support teams, integral advanced analytics, and several other technical considerations.

The segment between private citizens, associations and tiny organizations on the one hand and large, multinational corporations on the other is, however, a notable one. Small and medium sized enterprises and organizations make up a sizable portion of the economy, and often have their own needs of complex websites and custom made services.

Cross check the essential features mentioned above with the CMS list on Wikipedia to find a serious, professional, and long term CMS provider that fulfills your specific needs.

• Why upgrading your CMS might not be the answer »
• How Enonic can be the hub for your digital experiences »

Enonic is a CMS and content platform that fulfill all of the essential requirements of a future proof system. The platform enables you to build progressive web apps, web based APIs or complex websites. As the CMS is decoupled, you can create landing pages and traditional websites, as well as loading the editorial content onto any device or client.

Add to this a responsive and lean drag and drop editor, support for multiple sites and languages, structured content hierarchy, advanced image editing, permissions and user roles management, bulk publishing, a verified “app store” for marketing tools integrations, and much more, and you might have the CMS you are looking for.