- What is a CMS, and which one should you use?
We're talking about it on "The Journey."
- All right, so today we have a special guest,
Alycia from Sucuri.
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 website, or blog post,
manage your image media library, all that kinda stuff.
- Awesome, and now let's go over the top three CMSs.
I'm gonna be a little bit biased in this episode.
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 1/3 of the internet.
It has tons of plug-ins, tons of options,
and it's pretty resourceful.
And probably my favorite reason for why I use WordPress
is the community behind it.
They're such a large community that,
that just all comes together, there's meetups,
there's wordcamps, 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 CMSs
that we can possibly use?
- For sure, yeah, 'cause everybody's
heard of WordPress, so. - Yeah.
- Drupal is another very popular one.
It's been described to me as kinda 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 kinda thing because
of its ability to be a little more secure
in some areas, yeah.
- Yeah, and it's definitely one not for, like,
the smaller business type sites,
as Enterprise or large corporation type sites, right?
- 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% and I think like,
- It's a giant.
- Joomla's like 6%, so just, a little bit of a gap there
between the top two, but Joomla's also
a really awesome CMS to use.
You wanna 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 wanna stay on
the most recent branch of any CMS if possible.
- Yeah, that's just a best practice there.
All right, let's talk about, really, figuring out
which one should you use, right?
Like, what are some of the first steps we wanna think about?
- Definitely you wanna make sure that you know
what your requirements are for your website.
So how does it need to be for your users to use?
How are you gonna go about actually creating posts,
and what are the processes
that you're gonna use as part of that.
And then once you have all that,
you can kinda look at each CMS and see
what are the extensions and themes that are available,
And see if they'll match the requirements that you have
for your website.
- That makes sense, and it all comes down to
figuring out what's right for you.
Like, I will stand by WordPress all day,
but WordPress may not be right for your situations.
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 open-source.
- Yeah, for sure, so all those top three CMSs,
they're open-source, they're also free,
which is very important.
Open-source basically means that the source code
used to build WordPress, or Drupal, or Joomal,
it's all open and available,
and anybody can contribute to it as well.
- Right on.
- So that just means, it's constantly being improved,
by the community, and the community's 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 use, 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,
in 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 wanna look at the options
for your theme and you also don't wanna
discount, like, premium themes.
A lot of premium themes out there
will add extra functionality.
So you're essentially paying for the theme,
even though the CMS is free.
That's an awesome option, there's premium plug-ins as well.
Depending on what you need, the default themes
that come with it are sometimes a little restrictive,
so you wanna take a look at what the default themes are.
Try some different free themes,
and see what the options are
to get your site to look the way you want it to.
- Yeah, and what was kind of controversial at first,
in WordPress and 5.0, remember Gutenberg?
- Oh yeah.
- Gutenberg, is essentially the new WordPress editor.
The whole point is to kinda mirror
the printing press of just blocks and everything else.
- Yeah, what you see is what you get.
So as you're typing--
- Whizzy wig! - Yeah, whizzy wig!
Thank you.
- So as you're typing, yeah you see exactly
what you would see on the website.
So that comes default by WordPress.
It has made the experience, especially for first-time users,
easier to create.
Then there are page builders like Elementor,
or Beaver Builder, or WPBakery Builder,
that makes that user-experience a little bit easier.
If you're going on the WordPress realm,
and really want something that's pretty customizable,
you don't have to be a web developer or guru
to build that website.
- For sure, CMSs 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 CMSs to
make the user-experience a little easier.
- All right, so another thing
we probably have to think about is the hosting requirements.
We're gonna need for our applications.
Talk us through a little bit of 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.
- Yes.
- So that's really important, a lot of hosting companies
will offer 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 a very secure host,
it took me a long time, it took me like three days
to install WordPress,
and they have a famous 5-minute install.
You wanna look and see and maybe talk
to your hosting company about what the options are
for getting this CMS installed on your server.
- Right, 'cause, taking three days to get a website going,
just the beginning, is not something you wanna do.
There's a lot of places out there
that will do managed hosting, especially with WordPress.
There's managed WordPress, that has just
already, automatically installed
some extra security features.
And then what most people end up going with is like
a cPanel type Hosting, since it does have that
one-click install, with Installatron or Softaculous.
Whatever they're using.
- Totally. - Couple of clicks
of a button, and then it's there.
You can start building and designing, however you want.
All right so, the real reason I brought you on
to this episode is:
really talking about security with CMSs.
They're open-source, you constantly have to update them
so there's lots of things that we need to really
think about, to make sure our stuff's 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.
So that's something that 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.
You wanna make sure that you're not installing more plug-ins
than you need.
Trying to make sure that you're keeping
everything up to date,
if you have a managed solution, they'll do it for you.
Which is awesome. - Yup.
- You wanna 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 that 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 all kinds of cool security plug-ins,
security utilities that you can use with your CMS.
- Yeah, I know with WordPress,
the top security plug-ins that come to mind,
of course, Sucuri has this security plug-in,
but there's also Wordfence.
And then with having an SSL on your site,
super important just to encrypt that password,
'cause you have to login.
The beauty with CMSs, that you can access them anywhere,
right? - Yup.
- So, you wanna make sure that wherever
you're accessing 'em, your password isn't being
sniffed out by someone in the middle.
- Yeah you wanna be careful,
you don't wanna maybe do it in like an airport,
or coffee shop Wi-Fi, unless you're using a VPN.
'Cause if you are sitting there on public Wi-Fi,
and there's a hacker sitting next to you,
they could sniff your password as you're typing it in.
And then the next thing you know,
there's a bunch of spam pages on your site
that you need to deal with.
- 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 that it will virtually
patch your CMS, so if there is a security issue,
essentially, the firewall's 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.
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've figured out what CMS we're wanting to use.
We've got it installed, how do we go about documentation,
learning the program itself.
- There are some awesome resources out there.
You talked about WordPress,
WPBeginner has some awesome training guides and tutorials.
There's an awesome community for all of these CMSs,
with very active, like, support forums.
That's a great way to go about it.
And then obviously
if you have a developer or something like that,
that's helping you get some customization,
they can usually help you.
You wanna make sure that you're documenting everything
as part of your website as well, so.
It's just gonna help you later on down the line
if you know you have a list of all the users,
all the plug-ins and that kind of stuff,
and you're keeping that up-to-date.
- Yeah, especially if you have people on your team
that needs to access the site.
Giving 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 author, or contributor.
- Right. - Those roles are usually
built into the CMS
to allow you to make sure they can only access
what they should be allowed to access.
You only wanna grant admin privileges
to somebody for as long as they need it,
and that kind of thing.
- Now, 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 may not be top of mind.
- Right, what should we be doing with those updates?
- Yeah, definitely, I would say that
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 with the passwords,
and then you can't get into your hosting account,
or you can't 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, we 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,
but it is for security.
- Yeah for sure, I mean, with some CMSs
there might be different branches
that are still being actively developed.
So having a firewall that can virtually patch,
and make sure if there are any vulnerabilities
you have a little bit of an extra window.
'Cause whenever there's a security update released,
the hackers are looking, going, "Okay, here's the old file,
"here's the new file, oh look.
"There's the security flaw!"
So it can be-- - Then send all our bots out.
- Totally, it can a matter of minutes,
hours after a security patch is released
before there's active attacks in the wild.
So definitely update your sites as soon as possible.
Auto-updates are amazing,
WordPress 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 them just do it for you.
If you're using WordPress, GoDaddy, ProSites or ManageWP
has the one-click updates.
So you can update all your plug-ins, and your themes.
You even have a safe update option,
so what it does is, it'll update your site,
take a snapshot of before and after,
and make sure they're all the same,
and if there's an issue, it'll retract back to it.
It's a free option for you.
- Yeah that's perfect, you hit on a good point.
It's not a set it and forget it thing with a website.
You need to make sure that you're maintaining it.
And that 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 keeping it up-to-date and maintained.
- All right, the last point
that we should really talk about is,
really, your time and investment
with the CMS of your choice.
Talk us through a little bit of that, about that.
- For sure, we'll you wanna go in and realize
that it's gonna take you time to setup all the pages
that you want.
- Right - It may take you time
to find the right plug-ins, so you wanna
kinda 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 CMSs,
well you don't have to pay for the CMS,
so that's helpful.
- Right. - But it's customization
and security, and all those things that you
definitely wanna consider as part of
the whole package of having a website.
On-going costs for, domain, WHOIS privacy,
SSL certificates,
- Right, firewall, - All that kind of stuff.
- All that good things.
- Totally, yeah, there's a lot of accessories
that go on with having a website.
So you wanna figure, like I said at the beginning,
what those requirements are.
And then make sure you have a plan
for how you're gonna budget,
and the timelines around, when you wanna 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 wanna use those applications,
those developers that you hire
for Drupal or Joomla might cost more,
than a WordPress designer as well.
- For sure, yeah, and you wanna 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 out on the show today,
and helping us figuring out, what a CMS is,
why we should use one, you've been awesome.
- Thanks, my pleasure!
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