I am no expert on CMSs, but I will try to explain:
A CMS (or content management system) is a framework used for developing websites. Unlike websites where there are just a bunch of pages strung together, a CMS uses an administration panel to control everything from one place. CMSs usually use databases to store their info, instead of just having it on the page. The main benefits of a CMS are they are much easier to administer than a website that consists of hundreds of pages. You can make changes to certain things that will show on every page on the site. Also they usually have a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) interface where you can create pages for your site (if you know nothing about web design it makes it much easier).
Some common CMSs: Joomla, Wordpress, Xoops
Here is the Wiki definition (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system):
A
content management system (CMS) is a
computer software system used to assist its users in the process of
content management. CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and
multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates the
collaborative creation of documents. A
web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish
web content to
Web sites.
Web Content management systems are often used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. A content management system may support the following features:
- Import and creation of documents and multimedia material
- Identification of all key users and their content management roles
- The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types.
- Definition of the content workflow tasks, often coupled with event messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content.
- The ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content.
- The ability to publish the content to a repository to support access to the content. Increasingly, the repository is an inherent part of the system, and incorporates enterprise search and retrieval.
- Some content management systems allow the textual aspect of content to be separated to some extent from formatting. For example the CMS may automatically set default colour, fonts, or layout.
Crash Course in CMS
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