CMS – Evolution & Security

Tags: wordpressCMScontent management system

A great content management system (CMS) is one of the keys to making your web presence successful.  The evolution of content management systems and their security enhancements has been amazing over the last 20 years.

Back in the Day

In the late 90’s you needed to pay your ‘geeks’ to make simple updates to your site. At wisnet, we noticed that our customers were hesitant to make these updates due to time and additional cost to hire us to make these updates.  Enter Easy Site Editor (ESE) (circa 1997).  Team wisnet built ESE as groundbreaking tool for us to better serve our clients.  It was a super easy, secure data editor that allowed our clients to jump in and make updates without having to know ANY code.  ESE allowed our ‘creatives’ to design a great looking site and allow ‘slots’ for our customers maintained data without having to make code updates.  Real estate listings, event calendars, photo galleries, news, and more became fresh, dynamic content within our clients’ websites on a daily basis.  Twenty years later, ESE is still in use with many of our sites.

In the 2000’s Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress joined the web market. In this scenario, you would now install your choice of CMS on your server, select a template, and enter content. Speaking frankly, those templates were usually pretty ugly and limited. Much advanced customization was required if you wanted to actually create something spectacular. However, over the last number of years, these systems have become much more powerful and now provide formats for making some great looking sites.

Now all that said, due to the popular use of these content management systems and all the plug-in/add-ons that are not always ‘secure’, they also become large targets for hacking.  Our team has always been cautions recommending outside content management systems because of this factor – until a few years ago. New tools and urgent update notification systems have been created to assist with keeping many of these content management systems secure. Security has never been stronger, and it keeps getting better each year.

The Latest & Greatest (in our geeky opinion)

WordPress has grown tremendously since its founding and is now one of the largest content management systems in the world.  In fact, WordPress now powers almost 27 percent of the entire internet. Get more info on WordPress and some of its capabilities.   That’s pretty darn impressive if you ask us!

All and all, WordPress has made great strides in allowing for awesome design, performance, and security. Our team feels 100% confident in recommending WordPress for our website development platforms. To keep security at an optimal level we have implemented the following complementary services;

  • Daily WordPress snapshots
  • Free SSL Certificates with new WordPress sites
  • Firewalls that automatically block bad traffic
  • Automatic WordPress security core updates just to make sure we nab potential issues before they start.

A final friendly word of advice: Within your work in any content management system, it is important to keep your core installation and plugins up to date to keep your server, site and data secure.

Interested in learning more about WordPress and website security? This kinda stuff gets us pretty pumped up so we’d be happy to chat! Just drop us a note, give us a call @ 920-322-9522,  or swing by our office.