Content Management Systems

Posted, 8th June 2016

Also known as CMS, these are life savers for anyone who has little to no knowledge building a website. They make the upkeep of a website easy to control. You want a new page? Click new page and you just fill in the appropriate boxes with the content that is needed. No hassle, no coding necessary.

I used the WordPress framework to create this site. I have a blog and it is very convenient to log in, start typing up a draft and publish when I see fit. I find it the most flexible to use too. As a mainstream CMS there is a huge library of plugins and support to tailor a website.

This week I did a little bit of work for a friend using ekmPowershop. It’s built on .asp, which is quiet outdated. This is all hidden with the ekmPowershop CMS, which is fair enough. I was assigned to move some content from the top of the page to the bottom. If this was any other content management system I’m sure I could have completed the task in less than 5 minutes. This took a long time. I had to call ekmPowershop for them to amend the code for me to implement the changes.

They don’t give the option to create elements outside of their given preset. To me that seems extremely backward. While the CMS fulfils it’s purpose to make a site with a shopping basket quick and easy. It limits the possibilities for anyone wanting to create something more bespoke with is lack of format management.

Anyway everything worked out in the end. ekmPowershop offered to implement the changes personally and were very quick about it. As a developer though we should have the option to create new content easily.