There was a time when every website was hard-coded from scratch. There was no interactivity, content was static, and users expected little beyon...
There was a time when every website was hard-coded from scratch. There was no interactivity,
content was static, and users expected little beyond some unformatted text. Times have changed. The web has grown up, gotten more sophisticated, and much, much harder to write for. Writing even the simplest page from scratch has now become a chore fit only for those working their way through college or people running website creation businesses.
So what are these modern Content Management Systems? What is their role in the modern web world?
Content Management Systems
Content management systems make the creation of websites significantly simpler. They do all the heavy lifting for you, managing the back-end of your site. Content Management Systems control the flow of information on your site, rendering content from a database onto the page.
A blog is a classic example of something powered by a Content Management System. A blog maintains a database of posts with the date and time that they were published. The Content Management System then takes that data and uses it to render to a front page. With the Content Management System, all the blogger has to worry about is choosing a theme and writing the content for the posts.
Blogs are hardly the only application for a Content Management System. Pretty much any complex site can use a Content Management System. Even if your site consists largely of static pages, the ability to apply a template, quickly link to other pages and format the page according to an easy layout language makes Content Management Systems a lifesaver for many developers.
How does this relate to web hosting?
The thing about Content Management Systems are that they are written in a server-side scripting language. PHP, Ruby, Python and Clojure are all examples of these. In order for a Content Management System to work on your server, your server must support the language that the Content Management System is written in.
Any decent host will provide you with root access so that you can install any language you want. http://www.ubhosting.net/ is a good example of this. You get full root access with any plan you choose, so you aren't limited to a certain language.
Unfortunately, many budget hosts don't give you root access. They tightly control the server that you run on, often even controlling the installation of Content Management Systems. That means you are probably going to be restricted to older, more established languages, meaning you miss out on some of the more exciting new Content Management Systems out there. You will still be able to install the classics, as pretty much every server on earth has some form of PHP installed. That means you have support for Joomla, Wordpress, MovableType, and many, many others. But so many new tools are written in Ruby or even Javascript, thanks to the popularity of Node.JS.
When choosing a web host, make sure that you choose one that supports the Content Management System that you have chosen or have experience with. You don't want to be forced to use a platform you hate.
