What Is A Content Management System (CMS)

Web content refers to all the things that you see, hear, and read on a website. For instance, some sites have simple text on it, whereas another site may have some images along with the text. Yet another website may have audio and video files that can be heard and seen as part of your visitor experience. Even animations form part of various websites. All this collectively is known as web content. A content management system (CMS) is thus an application that is used to manage the content on websites.

When we say manage, we mean creating, editing, storing, publishing, searching, and managing all the textual and digital media on a website. Not just all kinds of web content, but a CMS is also used to manage other content such as audio-visual files, computer files, image media, as well as electronic documents.

Since so many diverse elements are present on most websites, it can get quite complicated to manage a site. Thus, to ease the task of content management, CMS were created.

Using Content Management Systems (CMS)

Here’s what you can do with a CMS:

• Manage all the data on a website
• Manage the life cycle of content on websites. For instance, with a CMS, you can approve content before it becomes live on the site. Also, you can determine the time when the content will go live, how long it will stay on the site, where it will appear on the site, and when the content should be removed from the site.
• A CMS is often used to create templates for different web pages. The content developers can thus concentrate on writing the content and the posting is taken care of by the CMS.
• CMS enables the content to be separated from the design of the site. It thus becomes much easier to personalize the content as well as share it with other websites and corporations.
• Managing the rights to your content also becomes very simple by using a CMS.

Types of CMS

Mambo : This is an open source content management system. It has a simple web interface that is used to create and manage web content. Its ease of use is one of its biggest advantages and also the reason for its popularity. RSS feeds, news flashes, forums, blogs, printable versions of web pages, and page caching are all supported on Mambo.

Joomla : This is another open source CMS that is freely available to web owners. Joomla can be used to manage and power all types of websites including corporate sites, e-commerce sites, online magazine portals, government websites, non-profit sites, and personal web pages.

Other available content management systems include Drupal, Typo3, etc.

Links

• Drupal.org Official Website
• Typo3 Official Website
  
• Joomla Official Website
  
• Top 10 Drupal Hosting Companies