Content management system
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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:
- User input
- users don't need to have HTML expertises, WYSIWYG or WiKi syntax solutions are implemented to help the users to create or to edit the content of a web page
- Content management
- manage the content and easely structure it
- Content architects can configure structure and menus of the system. This is not always easy and various systems differ a lot. Some only provide minimal functionality, other a series of "mini-cms" tools.
- Layout and Contents
- separate the structure of a web page from its content
- easy installation of a CMS (usually through a web-based installer)
- default templates for the graphical appearance, possibility to download other templates.
- easy change of the templates (directly via CSS files)
- Administration
- easy administration of the website via a web interface
- multi language support for administration tools
- sometimes possibility to store the different versions of an edited page
- user and permission management
- Groupware
- Most systems have groupware modules (like forums, and file sharing)
- Extensibility
- Possibility to extend the system with modules / plugins. Usually there is a documented API
Resources
- OpenSourceCMS: you can try a CMS before installing it
- cms matrix: useful to compare the features of different CMS
CMS Software (Portalware)
Most portals portals are built with these systems. Therefore a CMS is also some kind of portalware.
Small CMS
We call most of these C3MS (since they allow to manage content, communities and collaboration). In pure CMS functionality, most are rather weak. Here is a list of popular open source software:
- News engines
- C3MS
- phpnuke & postnuke: PHP & MySQL
- drupal: PHP & MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQL server...
- XOOPS: PHP
- midgard: PHP
- plone: Python/Zope
- Mambo Server: PHP and MySQL
- Joomla: fork of mambo server. PHP and MySQL
- CMSimple Content Management: no database needed, PHP powered
- CMS in the more narrow sense.
"Web 2.0" systems
Not sure what that means :)
Special purpose systems for education
Not that these are the only ones ...
Big systems
- Enterprise portals offer CMS functionality
- Others focus on content management, but are rather difficult to configure