Content Management Systems (CMS)

You may have heard the word “CMS” several times. Do you wonder what a CMS is …? Well it Content Management System is presented in the abbreviation CMS. Whatever it is, what does it do really?

Also have you ever think of how large sites manage their content? News sites like adaderana.lk, dailymirror.lk needs to be updated so often. If you are a person who only knows about web designing with HTML you may have wondered how these people manage their sites. Because editing html files and updating them in the server is not a much easy task. You need to edit the page locally and then update the remote server. Managing huge amount of content is not an easy task in this way.

Just imagine about a business. Most probably the business owner or managing director is a non-tech guy. Even though they have a web site it is difficult to update the site as needed. Think the manager needs to update the site with an immediate notice. What does he have to do? He contacts the web designing company and says his requirement. Then he may email the required content and after some time the site will be updated by the designing company. This takes much time and even cost much too. What if this non-tech guy have the chance of updating the site quickly?

Also we may add several types of content to the web site. We may add photos, audio, video and so on. Also we may need to provide a facility of user registraion, logging in and displaying user specific content. How about coding from the scratch ?

For all these problems the solution is Content Management Systems which we call CMSs in short. So what is a CMS? What do they do ?

In simple terms : CMS is  a system that manages content. Telling it in a descriptive manner,

“A CMS is a tool that enables a variety of technical and non technical staff to create, edit, manage and finally publish a variety of content (such as text, graphics, video, documents etc), whilst being constrained by a centralized set of rules, process and workflows that ensure coherent, validated electronic content….”

Watch this video so you’ll understand well……

So now you know what a CMS is. There are several types of CMSs.

• Enterprise content management systems
• Web content management systems
• Web group content management systems
• Component content management system

• Here we are going to discuss about the web content management systems. For others as well just look for this wikipedia article.

So what are the available CMSs ?

There are so many CMSs for different tasks. Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, DotNetNuke, phpNuke are some of the popular CMSs. You can see a huge list here.

Still confused?

How do they really work?

These CMSs are web applications. Written in a server programming language like php. So we’ll install them in the server and they will work like a software where we can continue developing the site.

Installing a software in the server? Oops

No no .. no need to fear. It’s not in the type u think of. Not much difficult. We’ll continue learning about Joomla in the next articles. So you would get a good knowledge and will be able to create a working web 2.0 site in minutes.