100 points to know about...
Eco-Design Web Development

A content management system (CMS) is a software/web application that allows you to create a website and manage a variety of contents easily (edit, modify, organize, delete), without any programming or web hosting knowledge.

Characteristics

There are several elements that define a CMS. It must offer the following possibilities:

• can be used simultaneously by several people
• offer a content publishing chain
• allow separate management of form and content
• allow easy structuring of website content (category architecture, pages, articles and diversity of content and plug-ins, such as FAQs, calendars, etc.)
• allow hierarchizing users and their access permissions (administrator, author, contributor, subscriber, etc.)
• offer website version management

The most famous CMSs are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Wix.

What it is for

Each CMS has its own user interface, which you must learn to master in order to use it to its full potential. This interface is central and allows you to manage both the form of the site and its content, and to have total control over what is published.

There are two types of CMS: the "complete" CMS and the "single-task" CMS. With a complete CMS, you can build any type of website: blog, e-commerce site, showcase site, etc. A single-task CMS is specialized in one of these uses.

A CMS can be Open Source or Proprietary. It does not necessarily use a database. It often offers templates or themes according to the use of the site.

The created website is accessible via a web browser, either on the "admin" side for updating and uploading content or on the user side, who will see the result produced by the CMS from your content and the template you have chosen. This greatly facilitates its creation and maintenance, whatever its purpose of use.

Advantages and disadvantages

Once the operating principle is mastered, CMS' advantages are:

• the time needed to develop and put a site online using CMS is reduced (and its cost too by extension)
• the design and use do not require advanced technical skills
• the content creator has full control over it
• the easy visualisation of the result of what is created (layout, page architecture thanks to a built-in visual page creator) according to the WYSIWYG principle (What You See Is What You Get, in other words, you can see the result of what you are building simultaneously on your screen)
• the possibility of saving layouts that you are satisfied with
• the addition of functionalities is facilitated (quiz, survey, calendar etc.)
• updating content can be done very easily
• the site created is well secured
• the SEO is facilitated

Depending on how you use a CMS, the disadvantages are:

• additional costs may be involved (adding features, plug-ins, maintenance, etc.)
• can be very resource-intensive for your server and can require a lot of RAM space
• without mastering the basics of the interface, the site can lose efficiency
• security problems can occur if regular maintenance and updates are not performed
• back-end functionalities are limited

What about eco-design?

With the completeness of its services and the richness of its functionalities, the CMS solution may appear to be an even more polluting tool and to be the antithesis of what we saw with static websites. This can be the case. But it is possible to set up your CMS in such a way that it is rooted in an eco-design approach from start to finish. We will focus on WordPress and how to make an eco-responsible website with this CMS in the next notions.