Content management system

Introduction

A content management system (CMS) is a system that permits to create and to organise the creation of content. Generally a CMS is a multiuser web based application that manages a website.

Generally all CMS have different common features:

• users don't need to have HTML expertises, WYSIWYG or WiKi syntaxt solutions are implemented to help the users to create or to edit the content of a web page;
• separate the structure of a web page from its content
• manage the content and easely structure it
• easy publish the content
• easy structurate the content
• easy installation of a CMS
• default templates for the graphical appearance, possibility to download other templates.
• easy change the templates (directly via CSS files)
• easy administration of the website via a web interface
• multi language support for administration tools
• sometimes possibility to stock the different versions of an edited page
• multiusers

Resources

• OpenSourceCMS: you can try a CMS before installing it
• cms matrix: useful to compare the features of different CMS

Open Source Softwares

Small CMS

We call most of these C3MS (since they allow to manage content, communities and collaboration. A lot of portals are built with these systems. Therefore a CMS is also some kind of portalware.

• slash: originally used for slashdot. Perl & MySQL
• phpnuke & postnuke: PHP & MySQL
• drupal: PHP & MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQL server...
• ezPublish: PHP
• XOOPS: PHP
• midgard: PHP
• plone: Python/Zope
• typo3: PHP and MySQL
• Mambo Server: PHP and MySQL
• Joomla: fork of mambo server. PHP and MySQL
• SPIP: PHP and MySQL
• CMSimple Content Management: no database needed, PHP powered

"Web 2.0" systems

Not sure what that means :)

• wikis
• blogs

Special purpose systems for education

Not that these are the only ones ...

• LMS
• LCMS