CMS is like a Volkswagen Beetle[/caption]My first car was a blue Volkswagen Beetle. Not one of the new mobile jelly-moulds, a real one.
And it was shit. Oh, by the standards of the day it was extremely reliable and economical. But then, to keep a car going, you actually had to know how it worked. It had things called ‘contact points’ and an ‘automatic choke’, for example, and both of these could render you immobile as easily as get you going. Contact points—which, just so you know, controlled the exact time that the spark-plugs fired, had to be adjusted regularly to account for wear, and in between services, which were very regular, they frequently had to be cleaned. You either kept a pack of Rizla cigarette papers in the glove-box to clean and set them with, or got used to walking.
Then there was the automatic choke, a hellish invention blessed by the Devil. This fiendish contraption used a simple bimetallic strip to decide what the temperature was, and then piled on the choke, which enriched the petrol/air mixture enough to start the engine, when it was cold. That was all fine and dandy, and the Bug fired up off the key every morning without fail, but Lord help you if you tried to start it part-warm, because the simple bi-metallic strip would shove on full choke and flood the motor with petrol, resulting in that sad, slowing, sound of engine cranking and refusing to start.
The trick here was to nip out, open the engine cover (Beetles were rear-engined), grab one part of the choke assembly with a pair of pliers and turn another with a screwdriver to reset the choke to off, and away you went.
All of this, required that you knew how the damn thing worked or you found yourself walking.
Well, decades later, cars are not like that. Modern cars just go, and actually are so fiendishly complex that if they stop going you’re stuffed. No amount of faffing about with cigarette paper will make a blind bit of difference, since there are no contact points now. It’s all done by computer.
CMS is like that
That’s kinda how I feel about web design. A decade ago I would work away with Dreamweaver or PageMill, and turn out okay-looking sites. But time moved on, html standards developed, CSS arrived, and, and...It’s like the modern car. You look under the hood and recognise...nothing at all. And the best the online ‘experts’ can tell you is to spend six months ‘learning code’.
You know what? I don’t have six months to faff about with Dreamweaver and its infernal obstinacy. I want sites that work, today, not six months in the future.
So if the old PageMill and frame or table-based methods were the Volkswagen Beetles of yesteryear, what are the new Lexuses? Well, they’re called Content Management Systems, or CMS for short. There are three big ones, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress, and they are all free. Most website hosts will install them for you on your hosted site for free, or if you use WordPress you can have a site on WordPress.com, also free. And like the cars of today, they just go. If you are ever tempted to look under the hood, you’ll close it instantly, and the fact is there is no need. These programs are specifically designed to allow you to make great sites that are easy to put together and maintain without knowing a single word of code. And they’re great.
Code is not poetry. Poetry is poetry. Sure, the modern CMS systems might restrict the ability of your inner coder to express him or herself, just like modern cars definitely put the mockers on your inner mechanic. But would I go back to driving a Vee-Dub? Nah. Been there, done that. In the same way as I want a car that just goes, I want a site-building system that just works
So I switched over to WordPress as my CMS for everything, and jettisoned Dreamweaver. I have already, in a couple of days, achieved more than I could have in weeks of footering with CSS code in Dreamweaver. I will keep you updated and hopefully you’ll find my experiences useful.
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