Content Management Systems

A Web Content Management System (WCM, WCMS or Web CMS) is content management system (CMS) software, implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and essential Web maintenance functions.

The software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease. Most systems use a database to store content, metadata, or artefacts that might be needed by the system. Content is frequently, but not universally, stored as XML, to facilitate reuse and enable flexible presentation options.

A presentation layer displays the content to Web-site visitors based on a set of templates. The templates are sometimes XSLT files. Most systems use server side caching boosting performance. This works best when the WCMS is not changed often but visits happen on a regular basis. Administration is typically done through browser-based interfaces, but some systems require the use of a fat client.

Unlike Web-site builders, a WCMS allows non-technical users to make changes to a website with little training. A WCMS typically requires an experienced coder to set up and add features, but is primarily a Web-site maintenance tool for non-technical administrators.

Common CMS
Drupal

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including:

Community web portals

Discussion sites

Corporate web sites

Intranet applications

Personal web sites or blogs

Aficionado sites

E-commerce applications

Resource directories

Social Networking sites

The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

Electronic commerce

Blogs

Collaborative authoring environments

Forums

Peer-to-peer networking

Newsletters

Podcasting

Picture galleries

File uploads and downloads and much more.

By Robin Fowler

Joomla

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available.

Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone. Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example:

Corporate Web sites or portals

Corporate intranets and extranets

Online magazines, newspapers, and publications

E-commerce and online reservations

Government applications

Small business Web sites

Non-profit and organizational Web sites

Community-based portals

School and church Web sites

Personal or family homepages and much more.

Joomla is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you're not an advanced user. Many Web hosting services offer a single-click install, getting your new site up and running in just a few minutes.

Wordpress

WordPress is an open source blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL which can also be used for basic content management. It has many features including a workflow, a plugin architecture, and an templating system. Used by over 200 million websites worldwide, Wordpress is the most popular blog software in use today.

WordPress offers features that are as good as if not better than any other software of its kind, for example:

Full standards compliance

XML-RPC interface

Workflow

WordPress Links

Cross-blog communication tools

Password Protected Posts

Easy installation and upgrades

Intelligent text formatting and much more.

Wordpress is most widely known as a blogging platform, but it's ease of use and updates to the Wordpress engine have made it a great tool for managing entire websites, not just a blog. That being said, blogs are still very easily integrated in to Wordpress. Blogs are a great way to keep people coming back to your site and draw new visitors.