what is a CMS and which one should you use we're talking about it on the journey [Music] all right so today we have a special guest Alicia from sakuni thank you so much for coming on today yeah thanks I'm happy to be here awesome so we're talking about what is a CMS and which one should you use for your website can you tell us a little bit about what a CMS is so CMS stands for content management system and it's basically an easier way to put pages live on your web site or blog posts manage your image media library all that kind of stuff awesome and now let's go over the top three CMS's I'm gonna be a little bit biased in this episode I'm just that's my disclaimer right there I'm gonna start with WordPress WordPress is the most popular content management system out there today powers over a third of the Internet it has tons of plugins tons of options and it's pretty resourceful and probably my favorite reason for why I use WordPress is the community behind it there's such a large community that just all just comes together there's meetups there's word camps and everyone just helps each other out for sure and I mean with 40,000 plugins almost like you have no end to the kind of functionality you can add to your CMS absolutely so what are some other CMS's that we can possibly use for sure yeah cuz everybody's heard of WordPress yeah Drupal is another very popular one it's been described to me it's kind of like a Swiss cheese you need to be a bit more technical to use Drupal but it does have a lot of different features compared to WordPress it has a different user experience and ultimately it's been used for a lot of things like government websites and that kind of thing because of its ability to be a little more secure in some areas yeah and it's definitely one not for like the smaller business type sites is a enterprise or a large corporation type sites yeah yeah for sure yeah Joomla is another really popular one as well it's got a really good community and it's got I think the second highest market share after WordPress although WordPress is like 30 percent and I think the giant Jim was like six percent so just a little a little bit of a gap there between the top two but Joomla is also a really awesome CMS to use you want to make sure that you're using the most latest version if possible there are two active versions available that you can use yeah you definitely want to stay on the most recent branch of any CMS if possible yeah that's just a best practice there alright let's talk about really figuring out which one should you use right like what are what are some the first so we want to think about definitely you want to make sure that you know what your requirements are for your website so how easy does it need to be for your users to use how are you going to go about actually creating posts and you know what are the processes that you're going to use as part of that and then once you have all that you can kind of look at each CMS and see what are the extensions and themes that are available and see if that though they'll match the requirements that you have for your website that makes sense and it all comes down to figure out what's right for you like I will stand by WordPress all day but WordPress may not be right for your situation so figuring out those requirements with those applications are super important yeah and usually a lot of the CMS websites have a great community because they are open source so tell us a little about that open source yeah for sure so all those top three CMS is their open source they're also free it's very important open source basically means that the source code used to build WordPress or Drupal or Joomla it's all open and available and anybody can contribute to it as well that just means it's constantly being improved by the community and the community is also checking to make sure that what's being added is secure all right so we want our website to look good right so is that something to think about when we're choosing what platform we used and how easy it is to create those sites totally so different themes will have different attributes like they may have a sidebar on the left or the right or they may be all one column and a never-ending scrolling website different themes will allow you to accomplish maybe what you need by having custom backgrounds or custom menus so you want to look at the options for your theme and you also don't want to you know discount like premium themes a lot of premium themes out there will add extra full functionality so you're essentially paying for the theme even though the CMS is free right that's an awesome option there's premium plugins as well depending on what you need the default themes that come with it are sometimes a little restrictive so you want to take a look at what the default themes are try some different free themes and see what the options are to get their site to look the way you want it to yeah and what was kind of controversial at first with WordPress in 5.0 remember Gutenberg oh yeah Gutenberg is essentially the new WordPress editor the whole point is kind of American of the printing press of just blocks and everything else yeah what you see is what you get so as you're typing yeah thank you so as you're typing yeah you you see exactly what you would see on the website so that comes with default by a wordpress and it has made the the experience especially for first-time users easy to create then there are page builders like Elementor or beaver builder or dumpy bakery builder that makes that user experience a little bit easier if you're going on the the WordPress realm and really want something that's pretty customizable and you don't have to be a web developer or guru to to build that website for sure CMS's are having to make things a little easier you know there's a lot of different places out there that are creating website builders that are super easy for people to use and so it's helpful for these open source CMS's to make the user experience a little easier alright so another thing we probably have to think about is the the hosting requirements we're gonna need for our applications talk us through a little bit about what that looks like for sure so most of these are running on PHP so you want the most updated version of PHP especially if you want the latest features and to make sure that you're getting those security updates so that's really important a lot of hosting companies will offer a one-click install for most of these major CMS applications some hosting companies especially when I first started creating websites and I was on a super budget but also very secure hosts it took me a long time with like three days to install WordPress and they have a famous five minute install so you want to look and see and maybe talk to your hosting company about what the options are for getting the CMS installed on your server right cuz taking three days to get a website going just the beginning it's not something you want to do there's a lot of places out there that'll do managed hosting especially with WordPress there's managed WordPress that has just automatically installed some extra security features and then what most people end up going with is like a cPanel type hosting because it does have that one-click install with install at ron or Softaculous whatever they're using a couple clicks of a button and then it's there you can start building and assigning however you want all right so the real reason I brought you on to this episode is really talking about security with CMS's they're open-source you can't stay have to update them so there's lots of things that we need to really think about to make sure our stuffs protected totally well with it being open-source not only are all the good people contributing code but all the bad people can also look at that code as well and find vulnerabilities that's something that you know a lot of people are concerned about especially with WordPress being so popular it is a large target the CMS itself is actually quite secure because there's a great community checking things out but you want to make sure that you know you're not installing more plugins than you need trying to make sure that you're keeping everything up to date if you have a managed solution then they'll do it for you which is awesome yeah you want to make sure that you have something some kind of security plug-in that's monitoring your site letting you know if there is a problem if they detect there are some that can also add features for protection like adding two-factor authentication which is a second password on your phone that you need to enter in order to get into your website there's there's all kinds of cool security plugins security utilities that you can use with your CMS yeah I know with WordPress the top security plugins that come to mind of course Sakuni has a security plug-in but there's also wordfriends and then with having an ssl on your site super-important just to encrypt that passwords you have to log in the beauty with CMS is that you can access them anywhere right yeah so you want to make sure that wherever you're accessing them it's your password isn't being sniffed out by someone in the middle yeah you want to be careful you don't want to maybe do it in like an airport or coffee shop Wi-Fi unless you're using a VPN you know cuz if you are sitting there and public Wi-Fi and there's a hacker sitting next to you they could sniff for your password as you're typing it in and then next thing you know there's a bunch of spam pages on your site that you need to deal with so so what about firewall I've heard that it should be important should be added to the site what's the validity with that definitely one of the nice things about a website firewall is it'll virtually patch your CMS so if there is a security issue okay essentially the firewall is taking care of that it surrounds your website and if somebody's trying to exploit a vulnerable plug-in on your site the firewall will catch that attempt and block it and just go they'll see a blocking page meanwhile all of your legitimate visitors are being sped up because of the global network of the firewall and content delivery network so we figured out what CMS we're going to use we've got it installed what how do we go about documentation learning the the program itself there are some awesome resources out there you know you talk about WordPress wpbeginner has some awesome training guides and tutorials there's a awesome community for all of these CMS's with very active like support forums that's a great way to go about it and then obviously you know if you have a developer or something like that that's helping you get some customization they can usually help you you want to make sure that you're documenting everything as part of your website as well so okay just gonna help you later on down the line if you know you have a list of all the users all the plugins and that kind of stuff and you're keeping that up to date especially if you have people on your team that needs to access the site give them documentation on what they should be accessing what they shouldn't be because sometimes the wrong click can make just chaos happen totally and good user passwords making sure that you've got the right role levels assigned to your users whether they're just an editor or an author contributor right those roles are usually built into the CMS to allow you to make sure they can only access what they you know should be allowed to access you only want to grant admin privileges to somebody for as long as they need it and that kind of thing now with with this website I know many of the entrepreneurs or even solopreneurs out there with their stuff has many hats to wear right sometimes maintaining it isn't always something that they have time for yeah it might not be top of mind right what should we what should we be doing with those updates yeah definitely I would say that you know it's very important to make sure that you always retain access to your property your web property so I've seen cases where a developer will leave a client and leave what the passwords and then you can't get into your hosting account or you can't get into WordPress it's not ideal so make sure you always have access to those things and make sure that you're just practicing safe security practices throughout all of it right on and with WordPress and Joomla everything else who talked about it earlier make sure you're at least going in there every now and then to update it to the next latest version it's not only for performance that is for security yeah for sure I mean with some CMS's there might be different branches that are still being actively developed so having over a fire wall convergently patch and make sure that if there are any vulnerabilities you have a little bit of an extra window is whenever there's a security update released the hackers are looking and going okay here's the old file here's the new file oh look there's the security flaw yeah so in all their BOTS so totally it can be a matter of like minutes hours after a security patch is released before there's active active attacks in the wild so definitely update your sites as soon as possible Auto updates are amazing has auto-updates on most hosts yeah and or you can hire developers like most designers or developers will have like a website care plan so you can have them just do it for you if you're using WordPress GoDaddy Pro sites or manage WP has the one-click updates and update all your your plugins and your themes you have a safe update option so what it does is it'll update your site take a snapshot at before and after make sure they're all the same if there's an issue it'll redirect back to it that's a free option for you yeah that's perfect you can own a good point it's not a set it and forget it thing with the website you need to make sure that you're maintaining it and that it's you know it's part of your business it's how your business looks so you should definitely make sure that you have some kind of plan for making it up to date and maintained all right the last point that we should really talk about is really your your time and investment with the CMS of your choice talk us through a little bit about that for sure well you want to go in and realize that you know it's gonna take you time to set up all the pages that you want right it may take you time to find the right plugins so you want to kind of think through whether you want to hire somebody or get some help with that to find the functionality and the look and feel that you're after definitely budget when it comes to free CMS's well you don't have to pay for the CMS so that's helpful but it's customisation and security and all those things that you definitely want to consider as part of the whole package of having a website ongoing costs for domain who is privacy SSL Certificates right all that good totally yeah there's a lot of accessories that go on with having a website so you want to figure out like I said at the beginning what those requirements are and then make sure that you have a plan for how you're gonna budget and the timelines around when you want to launch perfect and with Drupal and Joomla they are they do have that smaller market share so there's really specific requirements of when you want to use those application those developers that you hire for Drupal or Joomla might cost more than a wordpress designer as well for sure yeah and you want to make sure that you're really looking at the work that the developer has done and make sure that it matches what you're after there's lots of great websites out there that you know can tell you more about how to pick a developer depending on what you're after well thank you so much for coming on the show today and helping us figuring out the CMS is why we should use one you've been awesome it's my pleasure well if you liked this video go ahead and smash that like button add a comment below on something that you've learned and subscribe this channel and ring that bell if you'd like to see these episodes first this is the journey we'll see you next time
WordPress, Drupal, Joomla: Which One Should You Use? | The Journey
