A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system used to assist its users in the process of content management. CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates the collaborative creation of documents. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to web sites.
Web content management systems are often used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures.
A content management system may support the following features:
* Import and creation of documents and multimedia material
* Identification of all key users and their content management roles
* The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types
* Definition of the content workflow tasks, often coupled with event messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content
* The ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content
* The ability to publish the content to a repository to support access to the content. Increasingly, the repository is an inherent part of the system, and incorporates enterprise search and retrieval
* Some content management systems allow the textual aspect of content to be separated to some extent from formatting. For example the CMS may automatically set default colour, fonts, or layout
A Web CMS provides the following key features:
* Automated templates: Create standard visual templates that can be automatically applied to new and existing content, creating one central place to change that look across all content on a site.
* Easily editable content: Once your content is separate from the visual presentation of your site, it usually becomes much easier and quicker to edit and manipulate. Most CMS software include WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technical individuals to create and edit content.
* Scalable feature sets: Most CMS have plug-ins or modules that can be easily installed to extend an existing site's functionality.
* Web standards upgrades: Active CMS solutions usually receive regular updates that include new feature sets and keep the system up to current web standards.
* Workflow management: Workflow is the process of creating cycles of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in the CMS. For example, a content creator submits a story but it's not published on the website until the copy editor cleans it up, and the editor-in-chief approves it.
* Document management: CMS solutions always provide a means of managing the life cycle of a document from initial creation time, through revisions, publication, archive, and document destruction.
Types of CMS
* Module-based CMS. Most tasks in a document's life-cycle are served by CMS modules. Common modules are document creation/editing, transforming and publishing.
* Document transformation language-based CMS. Another approach to CMS building with use of open standards. XSLT-based CMS compile ready documents from XML data and XSLT-template. XML Sapiens-based CMS compile a document from the stream of ‘pure’ data, design template and functionality templates.
* Web-based CMS. Another approach to CMS building uses databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL or MS SQL, and scripting languages or tools such as Coldfusion, PHP, jsp or ASP to interact with the data to parse them into visual content. Data stored in a database is queried and compiled into html pages or other documents and transformed using cascading style sheets. These systems can include a number of other functions, such as discussion boards, blogs, or email newsletters.
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