Content management system
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Definition
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.
Note: CMS also may stand for course management system, but outside some restricted e-learning community, "C" stands for "Content".
Introduction
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
CMS in education
- To build a site with educational contents
- To engage students in project-oriented writing activities
- To present your school/organization etc.
Links
CMS Software
CMS systems are implemented with various kinds of portalware.
The list below only includes systems that focus on content management, i.e. allow/constrain editing of contents through some kind of structured and engineered system.
See 'portalware' for a more general list of software to build portals. (Almost any portal is a kind of CMS, since it lets users add contents ...).
- Small and free CMS (in the more narrow sense)
- Big systems
- Some enterprise portals offer CMS functionality
- Others focus on content management, but are rather difficult to configure
Other resources
- OpenSourceCMS: you can try a portalware before installing it
- cms matrix: useful to compare the features of different CMS