A little bit of history of custom-built CMS
In the early stages of the internet, there was no such thing as a Content Management System (CMS). In fact, they needed to be custom developed. Similarly to building websites in the early stage of the internet, knowledge of HTML was required to edit and publish content.
Tools were limited, and most people used languages like PHP, .NET, Ruby on Rails, and Python to create websites and craft experiences. However, these back-end languages were primarily designed to process large quantities of information and were not really designed for front-end experiences.
The custom-built CMS platforms were proprietary solutions created for a specific company or use case. They were centralized solutions that enabled users to manage content on a website.
However, the websites were essentially intermingled back-end code with front-end code that was limited to HTML and CSS. Also, a core problem with this approach was that back-end code needed to be modified to achieve front-end changes.
As browsers matured and dealt with more complex interactions such as dynamic websites, the custom CMS became a bottleneck for delivering unique results-driven experiences. Browsers offered new features, but the custom CMS was unable to scale to cope with these features as well.
As a result, there was a need to constantly check the CMSs capabilities against the browser, which became a time-consuming process if the initial architecture and CMS implementation didn’t align with your needs.
However, soon after this, we then saw the emergence of the Model View Controller (MVC) for back-end frameworks and JS-based front-end frameworks.
The MVC framework is an architectural pattern that divides applications into three components and separates the business logic on the server-side from the presentation layer.
The model handles application data. The view refers to the application user interface, and the controller handles input from the view and then updates the model accordingly.
Essentially, MVC began to revolutionize the way the web used to operate and also offered a friendly ecosystem to scale. But how did that lead to frameworks today?