What is a CMS and which one is best for digital newspapers?

Hello! What's going on?

Now that it is almost 15 years since BAB started developing Comitium, our own CMS for digital media, we would like to share with you this part of the most recent history of the Internet and the evolution of a technology based on the needs imposed by the market and the maturity of the users. All this has changed the way of understanding the creation, edition and management of content, whether it's a corporate website, an e-commerce, a personal blog or a digital newspaper.

What is the origin and reason for the emergence of CMS?

In the mid 90's having your own website was considered practically as a luxury. It required a development and maintenance structure that not everyone could afford, as long as we were talking about a company, of course, because personally it was almost unthinkable until the emergence of platforms like Blogger in 1999, later acquired by Google in 2003, the phenomenon of mySpace also in 2003 and more widely with the arrival of WordPress in 2004 or Tumblr in 2007.

Last century ... yes, yes ... how time passes ... to create and manage a website, we had to generate and manipulate documents of all kinds: HTML, hopefully we gave the first styles with a precarious CSS, without forgetting the editing of images and text, managed by the same code and in larger projects, with the help of databases. In short, we needed a whole series of resources and knowledge of software's added to the added economic cost that this meant: Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Office, MySQL and even Flash. Do you remember the visual effects of the websites developed with this technology? Some of them were a real portent of ActionScript, their own programming language.

In short, the motivation for the emergence of content management systems is quite evident: after Y2K and the threshold of the new century, a digital tsunami arrived that flooded our lives with new technologies: Internet, e-mail, instant messaging, social networks. It had definitely changed the way we communicate, interact and, of course, consume and share information. As MacLuhan said "The medium is the message" and the Internet is more than any other, within this global village that is today's information society.

The CMS phenomenon, acronym for Content Management System or content management system, arose precisely in response to the need to "do it yourself digital", partly motivated by the desire of Internet users to generate and publish their own content, basically blogs and websites, along with the demands of big companies and media companies to find a new way to manage and distribute large volumes of information constantly updated and consumed by large audiences. All this represented a good business opportunity for the IT industries, which could not escape to progressively implement standards for global use.

What are the main advantages of using a CMS or content management system?

Basically you do not need great computer knowledge, neither programming, design or usability, just Internet connection and a browser to access the control panel of the contents, whether static (buttons, headers ...) or dynamic (news, articles, images ...) and best of all is that today thanks to the responsive design, we have overcome the problem of multiplatform, cross browser and this ensures the correct display of content from any device and browser. In addition, we can have in the same space the friendly and intuitive management of different sites, in different languages and for several concurrent editors, with different access and performance roles.

The path that today have some of the most popular CMS, make these managers tested and very stable tools because the constant debugging or debugging code, almost always open, ie Open Source and corrections and improvements that users themselves provide, actively contribute to large communities of developers, can offer the end user countless plugins, add-ons, components and extensions that add very specialized accessory features such as widgets of all kinds, which make them an ideal technology for "non-technical" profiles due to their flexibility and versatility in editing, updating and delivering content, most of the time optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), essential if you want to position your content in the top positions of search engine results such as Google and have a subsequent control of the evolution of your project metrics with tools such as Google Analytics.

On the other hand, as there is no custom development of projects, this fact provides a significant reduction in costs, the consequent reduction of TTM (Time To Market) and the possibility of having an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) proposal with sufficient quality to test projects and business models, especially if we talk about e-commerce.

And you really thought there was no downside?

The biggest one is cybersecurity. Templates are very vulnerable, databases, user information, passwords and forms that with the use of captchas cannot compensate for the lack of data encryption. Often these platforms suffer massive attacks by international hacker communities, who want to discredit large companies by damaging their image in front of the competition and to expose security breaches that in most cases are solved with software updates between versions.

It is worth remembering that all CMSs are built on frameworks, structures designed for the implementation and development of an application, in order to separately manage data, actions, and how it is finally displayed in browsers. There are many frameworks, most of them also free to use, such as Symfony or Zend that despite being robust also need binding updates with the versions of the CMS you are using and subject to compatibility with the theme or template that gives the graphical appearance and the final functionalities that the website will have, once it is published. In short, a code is never sufficiently optimized and a whole set of casuistry that once we have our website running, imposes the maxim: look at me and do not touch me too much ...?

As you know, a good design and a good usability can be the determining factors when your project works, so you have to keep in mind that if you work with a standard CMS, Open Source or free software (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, PrestaShop ...) you can find the same design in many pages all over the Internet, users, bloggers, companies, e-Shops. Who have bought the same theme or template that gives graphic appearance and functionality to your website. There will always be the possibility that someone will tell you that, by chance, they have seen a page with a design exactly the same as yours.

If you wish you can customize your website, but this will represent an additional cost of design and development and perhaps also some headache with CMS updates and installed components. In the worst case scenario, you will simply not be able to update the version generating a major problem, since using free software implies the imperative need to keep it always updated to the latest version to avoid attacks on security breaches, which let's not fool ourselves, all software has, but in this case, being Open Source or open software, means that it is much easier to detect and exploit them. All this can make your project unnecessarily expensive and leave you back at the starting point to have to start all over again.

Finally you have to know that the after-sales service of templates and components is limited and will force you to open support tickets in English, because most of the time you will talk to developers from anywhere in the world and you will have to wait for inconsistent or ambiguous answers, which if you do not have a slightly technical profile, can leave you unsatisfied.

What types of CMS are there and which are the most commonly used?

Almost all of them are open source and free, with 100% responsive design and developed in PHP. We can group them by their features and/or functionalities:

E-commerce

PrestaShopIdeal for online businesses of any type and size. Easy to use and customize, designed for SEO positioning and to connect with certain ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning).

MagentoProfessional but less intuitive, and due to its complexity it requires more technical knowledge, designed for large projects with a 100% online business model.

Shopify
100% cloud service, designed to easily create and start a web business, without any technical or logistical knowledge. Ideal to easily manage orders and payments.

Multiusos

WordPress
It is perhaps the most standard blogging tool and increasingly used also for professional portfolios and corporate sites and / or entities that need a low cost and basic features.

Drupal
Versatile and highly customizable, with pre-installed plugins and components based on the needs and type of each project.

Joomla
The most popular. Simplicity of installation and ease of use, with a huge community of developers behind, you will have plenty of modules, components and templates adapted and grouped by business sector.

In all cases you have to download an installation package from their respective pages and create a database. Any plugin, module, or component you need can be found for free as long as you make the effort to adapt to its functionality, never the other way around, because then we would be talking about a custom development. Beware of free plugins, they are usually not recommended. If you are looking for something more specialized and/or stable, tested by a larger number of users, you will have to pay but you will also have a support service to resolve any questions and/or incidents.

Let's not fool ourselves, this is not the ideal scenario, because the main problem is that these plugins are updated at the same pace as the CMS versions, and that they do not limit the update because a plugin is not ready for the new version of the CMS.

In favor, it is good to know that there are countless blogs and forums, where thousands of people share their experiences every day and where by asking questions most of the doubts are solved.

What type of CMS is right for me if I have a digital publication?

If you really want to have a CMS that is an important part of your business, you have to know that the safest thing to do is to work with robust, tested and evolving technology and have flexible solutions to manage large volumes of content and large audiences with maximum security, always thinking about the speed of content delivery and future scalability.

Nowadays, the specialization in CMS for digital newspapers is very high, since the audience has changed its way of consuming news and has caused the need to evolve content managers to the new environment.

The timelines of the audience's social networks are the main source of traffic and gain special emphasis in new technologies such as AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages from Google) and FIA (Facebook Instant Articles) and of course the importance of being able to absorb large volumes of traffic in a very short time, without forgetting the SEO optimization of content, essential for the qualitative growth of any web project.

Another key factor is advertising and how it has changed in recent years. Institutional advertising is disappearing and segmented advertising for each type of audience, along with branded content, i.e. non-intrusive digital marketing actions, aimed at giving notoriety and visibility to brands, is being imposed as a new model.

In short, at BAB we have developed Comitium, our own CMS with almost 15 years of experience that offers global technological solutions to publishing projects and has its own development team dedicated to the corrective and evolutionary improvement of the product, which generates updates between 3 and 4 months.

A very important part of our business and collaborative environment is formed by a set of strategic partners and customers with digital newspapers, who use Comitium every day, and feedback us with their needs and usage experience.

If your editorial project needs a CMS specialized in digital newspapers do not hesitate to contact us and we will find a solution tailored to your needs.

Request Comitium information

We are with our clients from the conception to the technological development of their applications and throughout the digital strategy. In short, your success is our success.

In the next post we will talk about the different possibilities that exist today to develop Apps whether native, hybrid or Progressive Web Apps, essential for digital publishing projects where the recognition and recurrence by users is based on the consumption of information mainly from mobile devices.

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