From static pages to JAM stacks, the history of CMS is the core of open source and Web changes.
Content Management System (CMS) is a productive software category that covers all applications that create and modify digital content. Therefore, it is not surprising that the history of CMS can be traced back to the first website in the history established by Tim Berners Lee in 1990. The website is based on the Internet hypertext system HTML as the model, which only contains text and links.
The rudiment of the World Wide Web (WWW) is a static website, which can provide content without a back-end database. They consume very little computing resources, so they are fast to load because there are no database queries, no template rendering, and no client server request processing. In view of the fact that few people often "surf the Internet" at that time, especially compared with today, Web traffic is also very small.
Of course, open source software promotes this interoperability. In fact, open source has always played an important role in the evolution of CMS.
The rise of CMS
Fast forward to the mid-1990s, with the popularity of the World Wide Web and the increasing demand for frequent updates on the website - this is different from its original hosting manual style static content. This has led to the emergence of a large number of CMS products, such as FileNet, Vignette's StoryBuilder, Documentum and many other products. These are proprietary closed source products, which were not rare at that time.
However, at the beginning of the 21st century, open source CMS alternatives appeared, including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. WordPress includes an extensible plug-in architecture and provides templates that can be used to build websites without requiring users to have knowledge of HTML and CSS. The WordPress CMS software is installed on the Web server and usually works with MySQL or MariaDB databases (both are open source, of course). The fact that CMS is open source has accelerated the significant transformation to WordPress to a certain extent.
Even today, about one-third of websites are built using these first generation content management systems. These traditional CMS are single systems, including back-end user interfaces, plug-ins, front-end templates, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Web servers, and databases. Whenever a user requests a website page, the server first queries the database, and then combines the results with data from page tags and plug-ins to generate an HTML document in the browser.
Trend to LAMP stack
The emergence of open source CMS is consistent with the infrastructure built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python) stacks. This new structure represents the beginning of single Web development. It enables the creation of dynamic websites to use database queries to provide unique content for different end users. At this point, the static website mode previously placed on the server really began to disappear. (Static website mode refers to a single file composed of text and links, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc., which is transmitted to all end users in the same way.)
Mobile Web changes everything
As we gradually entered the first decade of the 2000s, early mobile devices such as Palm and Blackberry provided access to Web content, and then smart phones and tablets launched around 2010 enabled more and more users to access the Web through mobile devices. In 2016, the balance was tilted, and the global web traffic from mobile devices and tablets exceeded that from desktops.
A single CMS is not suitable for providing content for these different types of access devices, which requires different versions of websites - usually compact websites for mobile users. The emergence of new types of devices that can access the Web, such as smart watches, game consoles, and voice assistants (such as Alexa), only exacerbated the problem, and the demand for omni channel content delivery became obvious.
The emergence of headless CMS and JAM stack
Headless CMS decouples the back end (used to store all content, databases and files) from the front end. Generally, headless CMS uses APIs to access the contents of databases (SQL and NoSQL) and files for display on websites, smartphones, and even Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In addition, Headless CMS has nothing to do with front-end frameworks, making it compatible with various static website generators and front-end frameworks (such as Gatsby.js, Next.js, Nuxt.js, Angular, React, and Vue.js), which allows developers to choose their favorite tools freely.
Headless CMS is especially suitable for the web development architecture of JAM (Javascript, API and Markup) stack. This architecture is becoming a popular solution because it can provide better web performance, SEO ranking and powerful security measures. The JAM stack does not depend on the Web server. When there is a request, static files can be provided immediately. There is no need to query the database because the file has been compiled and provided to the browser.
The transformation to headless CMS is driven by a new round of participants, some of whom use SaaS methods, such as Contentful, and some use self hosted open source alternatives, such as Strapi. Headless CMS is also subverting the e-commerce industry. New software editors, such as Commerce Layer and Saleor (also open source), provide solutions to manage multiple SKUs, price and inventory data in a truly omni channel way.
summary
In the whole evolution process of CMS, driven by the information consumption mode on the Internet, open source software also follows the same trend, and new technologies are emerging to address emerging needs. In fact, there seems to be an interdependent relationship between content management systems, the World Wide Web and open source. The need to manage more and more content will not disappear soon. We have every reason to expect a wider adoption of open source software in the future.
via: //opensource.com/article/20/7/history-content-management-system
Author: Pierre Burgy Topic: lujun9972 Translator: wxy Proofread: wxy
This article was originally compiled by LCTT, and Linux was proudly launched in China
