Question about web dev from a noob. (Adding Content)

I'm a computer science student spending the summer teaching myself how to code a website from scratch using HTML, CSS, and Javascript/JQuery.

I've been analyzing websites and wondering about the process of admins adding content to a website.

I look at a page with content headlines, thumbnails, etc like Giant Bomb for example:

And I'm just curious, obviously the authors of these posts aren't going into the HTML and manually adding the images and text, so to make everyone's lives easier do the web devs write a Javascript app or something that creates a dialog with fields for all parts of the content? And then after the authors enter the content, the application automatically creates the elements, applies styles, and appends them as list items to the page?

A lot of the resources on creating a website I have been studying only go as far as to show how to tediously create the elements that makeup a website, but don't give insight on how to intelligently maintain a site where you are constantly adding content, and allowing other non-coders to add content.

Any info would be greatly appreciated and I hope this question is appropriate here. Thank you.

Databases dude.

But yeah, they have some kind of CMS that editors use to upload videos, write stories and what not. I imagine they might have some markup rules as well so they can make their stories look pretty.

After they put stuff into the system, you would have a reliable structure enforced by your database then you just write your front end to to render it after getting it from some web service.

The example you showed could be stored in something like this:

Story:

• Title
• Deck
• Author
• Date Published
• Type
• Is Premium
• Preview
• Content

Comments would be stored separately and related to a story. This would be enough info to render any of the things you showed above.