HTML (1996) to CMS (2012)
HTML 5 is the coding language that drives the Internet and is in now in use with most browsers supporting at least some of the features that simplifies previous code and adds functions for browsers. A Content Management System (CMS) gives you the ability to manage text, images and the structure of a website which you the user can update as easily as using Microsoft Word.
It was about 1996 or so when I first noticed “View Source” in the browsers menu and started looking at the code of the Internet, html. I quickly realized it was a bunch of ordered letters, numbers and symbols found on any keyboard. It produced web pages containing information and graphics in a way I hadn’t or few had seen before. This was very cool for someone that had never had a programming background and I was immediately drawn to it.
I could put a number of these brackets, slashes and punctuation symbols together in a sort of order and when I looked at it with a browser it produced styled text, pictures, boxes and colours. I knew I had to do more of this and found that I had the most fun when the code didn’t work and I had to find out why. I spent days at a time staring at the monitor at every comma, semi colon and bracket. Oh I had clues from the way the page looked in the browser but the severity of the displayed damage hardly ever related to the severity of the mistake, one tiny thing like a misplaced quotation mark or colon threw everything off.
Websites in the early days were a tough sell at times because the client could never touch the code and they were tied to the designer forever to make changes at a high cost. At least one of the sites I took care of grew to well over 100 pages, all hand coded and had to be added to the ever growing navigation bar until it became so disorganized it finally broke and a navigation redesign had to happen. About that time I had come across php code and found that with a few simple lines of code I could put all the navigation in two files and by making one coding change it would affect 30 or 40 pages at the same time.
Pretty soon I was building websites with simple some may say crude php code with no database mind you and it worked. I could do the heavy coding once and add a small line of code to any number of web pages and it would reproduce it the same way every time. Gradually I was designing one master page that the entire site could be built on. Not to say I came up with the idea, I was borrowing code and ideas from someone smarter and no doubt younger who had put together an entire programming system built on that idea called CMS.
In around 2002 the first CMS I started with was Joomla for 15 or 20 sites. WordPress was still developing and had a nice but limited application. Since then WordPress has dominated the market and third party developers have been right there supporting it with add on sub-programs called plugins to help you customize your site for you or your customers needs.
Since then WordPress has taken over the lion’s share of the CMS sites and done it very well. It combines power and a user friendly interface to manage it. It’s fairly easy to upload, you do have to begin by starting a database but once that is there you install a theme and a few plugins and go for it.
