Content Management Systems (hereby CMS), are all the rage nowadays, and while they can sound extremely complex, they’re no more than a tool for you to organize your website – much like your desktop on your computer.

A modern content management system saves each piece of information as an individual database node, by doing this it makes the template (display code, the webpage you see), able to be completely dynamic, because the template is always what you want it to be, displaying the info you want it to be.

Let’s try to explain it in a visual method.

You have 3 posts. Maybe in a database your 3 posts look something like this

[post-title0:title;post-title1:title2]

This isn’t legible information to the untrained eye, but nearly every computer can interpret SQL, XML and JSON in our current zeitgeist of technology.

So along with your 3 posts, you have 3 themes.

If you activate a new theme, your 3 posts will inherit the styles of the theme because they are modular – independent of each other and able to be mixed and maxed easily. This is the TRUE beauty of CMS design, with the ability to separate the data from the “view” (which we would call the webpage’s design in modern terms).

The implications from this are enormous. When I’m coding to do design I never have to worry about the words because I’ve already typed them, so I’m free to think about how I want to style my code without thinking about my code at the same time. Without these such protocols, we would all be using raw HTML! Every service we use daily is built on a Content Management System of some sort. If Facebook didn’t have your user information saved in a database table, how could it pull it so fast? This is the exact same technology I use when making site, making it able to produce lightning fast, beautiful results from highly organized structured sources of data. WordPress is of course the best example of this, as not only is it my CMS of choice, it’s the most popular on the net. WordPress is first and foremost a management tool. It was meant to be a blog at it’s inception, but the community soon turned it into a full-fledged framework and now it is the most popular on the net.