 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, Alicia 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 posts, manage your image, media library, all that kind of stuff. Awesome. And now let's go over the top three CMSs. I'm going to be a little bit biased in this episode. I'm just this my disclaimer right there. I'm going to 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 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, because everybody's heard of WordPress. So Drupal is another very popular one. It's been described to me as 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. Those enterprises are 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 it's a giant Joomla is like 6 percent. So just 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. But yeah, you definitely want to 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 what are some of the first steps 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 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 CMSs, they're 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. Right on. So 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 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 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 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 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 your site to look the way you want it to. Yeah. And what was kind of controversial at first with WordPress and 5.0, remember Gutenberg? Oh, yeah. Gutenberg is essentially the new WordPress editor. The whole point is kind of mirror kind of the printing press of just blocks and everything else. Yeah. What you see is what you get. So as you're typing... Wizzywig. Yeah, Wizzywig. Thank you. Yeah. So as you're typing, yeah, you see exactly what you would see on the website. So that comes default by WordPress and it has made the experience, especially for first time users, easier to create. Then there are page builders like Elementor or Beaver Builder or WP Bakery 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 and 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 going to 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 host, it took me a long time. I took 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, because taking three days to get a website going just the beginning is not something you want to 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 magically installed some extra security features. And then what most people end up going with is like a C-panel type hosting. So it does have that one-click install with install a Tron or Softaculous, whatever they're using. Totally. That couple clicks of a button and then it's there and 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 is 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 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'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, they'll do it for you, which is awesome. You want to make sure that you have something, some kind of security plugin that's monitoring your site and 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 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, security has a security plugin, but there's also WordPress friends. And then with having an SSL on your site, super important just to encrypt that password because you have to log in. The beauty with CMS is that you can access them anywhere, right? So you want to make sure that wherever you're accessing them, 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 on an airport or coffee shop Wi-Fi unless you're using a VPN. Because if you are sitting there in 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 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 of Firewall is it'll virtually patch your CMS. So if there is a security issue, essentially the firewall is taking care of that. It surrounds your website. And if somebody's trying to exploit a vulnerable plugin on your site, the firewall will catch that attempt and block it. And 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 were wanting to use. We've got it installed. How do we go about documentation and learning the program itself? There are some awesome resources out there. You talked about WordPress. I think WPBGinner has some awesome training guides and tutorials. There's an awesome community for all of these CMSs with very active 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 of the users, all the plugins 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, 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 or contributor. 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 might 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 get into WordPress. It's not ideal. So make sure that 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 Jumla, 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 can virtually patch and make sure that if there are any vulnerabilities, you have a little bit of an extra window because 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. Yep, and they send all their bots out. Totally, it can be a matter of like 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 have them just do it for you. If you're using WordPress, go to any pro sites or manage WP has the one click updates. You can update all your plugins and your themes. You have a set safe update option. So what it does is it'll update your site, take a snapshot of it before and after, make sure they're all the same. And if there's an issue, it'll retract back to it. That'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 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 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. August, we're loaded up about that. For sure. Well, you want to go in and realize that, you know, it's going to 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 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 want to consider as part of the whole package of having a website, ongoing costs for domain, who is privacy, SSL certificates, all that kind of stuff. 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 going to budget and the timelines around when you want to launch. Perfect. And with Drupal and Juma, they are, they do have that smaller market share. So there's really specific requirements of when you want to use those applications those developers that you hire for Drupal or Juma 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 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 figure out what a CMS is and why we should use one. You've been awesome. Thanks, my pleasure. Well, if you've liked this video, go ahead and smash that like button. Add a comment below on something that you've learned and subscribe to 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.