A CMS in the cloud offers many advantages. In this article, I will explain what it is exactly and what the benefits are.
But first, what exactly is a CMS in the cloud? In short, a CMS in the cloud is a CMS environment that you do not need to download and install on your own hosting space. A cloud-based CMS is a CMS where the CMS interface is hosted on the servers of the CMS provider.
What about hosting with a CMS in the cloud?
In most cases, you no longer need your own hosting. Webigniter offers free hosting with every website. Depending on the chosen package, you have a certain amount of disk space at your disposal. Only if you need more resources within your hosting package, the included hosting package may no longer be sufficient. Then you can always choose to purchase an external hosting package. The Webigniter CMS can be just as easily connected to an external hosting package as to a hosting package from Webigniter itself. You can also link your own domain name to your Webigniter account if you wish.
Since the CMS is in the cloud, you immediately save on hosting costs. Even if you opt for external hosting, you need less space because the CMS does not need to be installed on your hosting package.
It is even a greener alternative. For example, WordPress takes up (at least) 70MB of space on every WordPress website. WordPress currently has about 75 million websites, which means the total disk space used is at least 5.25 petabytes(!), and this number is likely even higher. And this is 75 million times the exact same source code, which is not very efficient.
But how does the CMS communicate with my website?
Since the CMS is not directly installed on your hosting, there is also no direct source of data that provides content to your website. The Webigniter CMS installs the Webigniter client with every account. This is a small but powerful piece of code that manages the communication between your website and the Webigniter servers. This client currently (at the time of writing) has 25 functions that you can use to pull data from the CMS to your website.
For example, to retrieve the SEO snippet (which contains all the SEO tags and data), you simply use in your frontend files:
<HEAD>
<?=$webigniter->getSeoSnippet();?>
<!-- The rest of your HEAD tags -->
</HEAD>
Or when you want to retrieve the navigation you have set up in the CMS:
<?php foreach($webigniter->getNavigation(handle: 'topmenu') as $menuItem):?>
<a href="<?=$menuItem['link'];?>"><?=$menuItem['name'];?></a>
<?php endforeach;?>
And there are many other functions you can use to get all the data from the CMS into your website.
No more running CMS updates
How much time do you currently spend keeping your CMS systems up to date? We recently conducted a poll on LinkedIn, and it showed that 49% of developers spend 1 to 4 hours per month updating their CMS, and 32% even spend 5 to 8 hours per month on this. Besides being a huge waste of your time, an update always carries risks; will my plugins still work with the new version, for example?
With a cloud-based CMS like Webigniter, you never have to worry about this again. The CMS updates are carried out by us on our own servers and will never, ever cause your website to suddenly stop working. And all this while you sleep, are on vacation, or at work.
Managing multiple websites with one account
As a developer, you often manage more than one site. Without a CMS in the cloud, you need a different login URL, username, and password for each website you manage. This is, of course, very cumbersome. With the Webigniter CMS, you only need one login account to manage all your sites. In the interface, you can easily switch from one site to another in the top right corner, so you can immediately complete your work on the other site without having to log in elsewhere first. It may even happen that you have different roles at different sites as a developer, giving you different permissions.
Conclusion
Does a CMS in the cloud have any disadvantages at all? Well, actually not. It offers advantages for everyone, but especially for the web developer who values flexibility and scalability.
