CMS - content management system
A content management system or CMS is the collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be both computer-based or manual and are designed to do numerous things such as: Aid in easy storage and retrieval of data, allow for a large number of people to share and contribute stored data, control access to data based on user roles such as defining which information user groups or users can edit, view or publish etc. CMS procedures also improve communication between users, reduce repetitive duplicate input and improve the ease of report writing.
Data can be defined as nearly anything in a CMS including: movies, phone numbers, scientific data, pictures, documents and so forth. Content management systems are often used for revising, storing, publishing, controlling and semantically enriching documentation. Version control is one of the main advantages of a CMS and serving as a central repository, the CMS increases the version level of new updates to a previously existing file.
A Web Content Management or WCM system is a CMS specifically designed to simplify the publication of web content to web sites and mobile devices. In particular, WCM allows content creators to submit content without needing technical knowledge of the uploading of files or HTML. Various web-based content management systems exist in both the commercial and Open Source domains.
A Web Content Management System or WCMS is a software system designed to provide website collaboration, authoring and administration tools in order to allow users with little knowledge of markup languages or web programming languages to manage and created the site`s content with relative simplicity. A rich WCMS offers users the ability to manage output and documents for multiple author participation and editing and provides a strong foundation for collaboration.
The majority of systems utilize a database to store metadata, content or artifacts that might be needed by the system. Frequently, but not universally, content is stored as XML in order to reuse, facilitate and allow flexible presentation options. A presentation layer displays the content to Web-site visitors based on a set of templates and these are sometimes XSLT files.
Many systems use server side caching boosting performance and this works best when the WCMS is not changed often but when visits happen regularly. Unlike Web-site builders, a WCMS lets not-technical users without a lot of training make changes to a website. A WCMS usually needs an experienced coder to set up and add features but is mainly a Web-site maintenance tool for non-technical administrators. Typically, administration is done through browser-based interfaces although some systems require the use of a fat client.
