CMS/E-commerce engine and template, what’s the difference?

The following article is going to explain the difference between CMS/E-commerce engine and template.

A content management system (CMS) is a computer application that allows publishing, editing and modifying content as well as maintenance from a central interface. They allow editing and publishing website content from a central interface like a web browser. The most common CMS engines are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.

CMSs are often used to run websites containing blogs, news, and shopping. Many corporate and marketing websites use CMSs. CMSs typically aim to avoid the need for hand coding but may support it for specific elements or entire pages.

A CMS may serve as a central repository containing documents, movies, pictures, phone numbers, scientific data. CMSs can be used for storing, controlling, revising, semantically enriching and publishing documentation.

The detailed list of the CMS systems you can find on the following page.

Electronic commerce, commonly known as E-commerce or eCommerce (for example, Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart and other), is trading in products or services conducted via computer networks such as the Internet. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at one point in the transaction life-cycle, although it may also encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail, mobile devices, social media, and telephones.

You can check major e-Commerce systems and their peculiarities on the following page.

A website template is a pre-designed webpage, or set of webpages, that anyone can modify with their own content and images to setup a website. Website templates allow anyone to setup a website without having to hire a professional web developer or designer, although many developers do use website templates to create sites for their clients. This allows anyone to set up a reasonably priced personal or business website that will be listed in search engines when users search for your product or service. The source files of these templates are always in the PSD format which belongs to the Adobe Photoshop software.

A template controls the overall look and the layout of a site. It brings together common elements, modules and components as well as providing the cascading style sheet for the site.

We can make the conclusion, that templates are developed to make web designer’s life easier. Engines are for programmers.

We are designers’ company and develop templates for different CMS and E-commerce systems. That is why we provide full support only for the themes we created.

In case you have some issues with your CMS engine or e-Commerce platform functionality or you want to change/broaden your dashboard functionality, the best way is to join your CMS/E-commerce community. Open-source applications provide the wide range of support forums, blogs, knowledge-base. Feel free to share your issues and solutions with the users of the same engine.

Below you can find some useful links to those projects for which you can purchase templates on our website:

WordPress

http://wordpress.org

Joomla

http://joomla.org/

Drupal

https://www.drupal.org/

Magento

http://www.magentocommerce.com/

PrestaShop

http://www.prestashop.com/

OpenCart

http://www.opencart.com/

Zen Cart

http://www.zen-cart.com/

osCommerce

http://oscommerce.com/

http://www.oscommerce.info/

VirtueMart

http://virtuemart.net/

Jigoshop

http://jigoshop.com/

WooCommerce

http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/

Shopify

http://www.shopify.com/

Loaded 7

http://loadedcommerce.com/