What is a CMS?
CMS = content management system.
The purpose of a content management system is to make it easier for an individual or organization to manage online content.
The majority of websites are created manually, using a program such as Dreamweaver, based on using HTML code. When you browse the Internet, HTML is basically telling your browser to do things—display an image, display some text, or make a link that people can click on. So most websites are created by people putting bits of code together to form them. But content management systems can do a lot of the work for you, and you don’t necessarily need to know any HTML (although it can be helpful).
HTML
To learn more about HTML, and to gain an appreciation of how much easier it is to make a website using CMS, try taking a peek at these free HTML tutorials: www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp. Then, if you want to have some fun, try signing up for a Gmail address (http://mail.google.com), log into the free blog tool at blogger.com, and make a blog (it’s easy). In Blogger, make a new post and use the Compose tab to format text. Then try switching to the HTML tab to see what happens. Try using Blogger’s built-in function to make a link, using the Compose tab and switching to the HTML tab to see what’s going on behind the scenes. This whole time, you’re using a CMS! Blogger is an example of a Web-based CMS. If you didn’t have Blogger, you’d need to write all of the code and upload it every time you made a post.
On a traditional website, when something needs to be changed, someone needs to find the file that corresponds to a given page, make the change, and upload it to a server, which is either owned and operated by the organization itself or by a Web hosting company. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_server.
The Web hosting company maintains a set of specialized computers (the servers), which are connected to the Internet continuously, so when users view a website, they are downloading the Web page from the server to their own computer, using an Internet browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.
When the website gets bigger, maintaining it can become more challenging, especially if there are multiple people working on it and if there are different versions of articles or content that need to be tracked.
Concentrate on the Content
What a content management system does is to allow the user to concentrate on the content.
In a sense, a content management system is like having a dedicated person maintaining the website. In fact, in some cases, the reason why many people start using a content management system is because IT professionals can end up being a bottleneck, getting buried with requests for manually updating a site. And a content management system can relieve the pressure on the IT staff, enabling nontechnical users to add content.
The user creates the content, and the content management system, or CMS, creates the appropriate files, places them in the right spot on the server, and keeps track of them in case there is a need to make changes.
For example, this is what a “blogging” system does—it effectively allows you to have a website without necessarily having to know anything technical.
Content management systems are especially helpful for organizations and websites where there is the need to have a variety of people all contributing content to the website. All that participants need to do is to go to the Internet, log on to the CMS, and add their content, by typing it in, uploading a document, and so on.
Whoever is administering the CMS can log on; create a new user; and allow new participants to add, change, or delete content.
One of the most interesting facets of the content management phenomena is that most people now have direct experience in using a CMS without even realizing it. For example, the massively popular website Wikipedia was recently recognized as one of the top five most recognized brands in the world, along with names such as Apple Computer and Starbucks, and it is built using a CMS system called Wikimedia.
CMS Characteristics
One of the most helpful and useful things about a CMS is its ability to set permissions, where you can set a desired amount of access to different parts of the site, so some visitors may be able to read the content, and others may be able to submit, but only specified people might be allowed to delete, for example.
Another nice thing about a CMS is that you can involve people in making a website without requiring them to be technically proficient. That is, typically a Web page is created by a Web developer, who understands all the related technical issues and is often the person who is uploading the content to a Web server. So in many situations, certain people create the content and then pass it along to a Web developer, who is the one who puts it up there.
A CMS provides a way for anyone with an Internet connection to contribute to a given site. It can certainly help to have a developer still involved, especially if there may be the need for customization, so a CMS doesn’t affect the job security of Web developers. In fact, Web developers may like content management systems, because in certain cases, instead of having to upload and maintain a site, they can help participants to have direct access to content, so that the developer can concentrate on other things, such as customization.
Let’s review: CMS = content management system:
A content management system makes it easier to manage a website.
Before CMS, to do a website, you had to make a file and upload it any time there was new material or a change.
With CMS, anyone can sign in and add content, as easily as checking email. In some cases, like on Wikipedia, you don’t even have to sign on.