Content Management Systems (CMSes)

What are CMSes?

A content management system (CMS) is a system used to manage the content of a website. Typically, a CMS consists of two elements: the content management application (CMA) and the content delivery application (CDA). The CMA element allows the content manager or author, who may not know Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), to manage the creation, modification, and removal of content from a website without needing the expertise of a webmaster. The CDA element uses and compiles that information to update the website. The features of a CMS system vary, but most include web-based publishing, format management, revision control, and indexing, search, and retrieval.

The web-based publishing feature allows individuals to use a template or a set of templates approved by the organization, as well as wizards and other tools to create or modify web content. The format management feature allows documents including legacy electronic documents and scanned paper documents to be formatted into HTML or Portable Document Format (PDF) for the website. The revision control feature allows content to be updated to a newer version or restored to a previous version. Revision control also tracks any changes made to files by individuals. An additional feature is indexing, search, and retrieval. A CMS system indexes all data within an organization. Individuals can then search for data using keywords, which the CMS system retrieves.

A CMS system may also provide tools for one-to-one marketing. One-to-one marketing is the ability of a website to tailor its content and advertising to a user's specific characteristics using information provided by the user or gathered by the site (for example, a particular user's page sequence pattern). For example, if you visit a search engine and search for "digital camera," the advertising banners will advertise businesses that sell digital cameras instead of businesses that sell garden products.

Two factors must be considered before an organization decides to invest in a CMS. First, an organization's size and geographic dispersion must be considered especially if an organization is spread out over several countries. For these organizations, the transition to CMS is more difficult. Secondly, the diversity of the electronic data forms used within an organization must be considered. If an organization uses text documents, graphics, video, audio, and diagrams to convey information, the content will be more difficult to manage.

4 Types of CMSes

  1. enterprise CMS (ECMS) - These systems tend to be for internal web based content management but may have a "public publishing" section maintained via the internal Content Management System.
  2. Web CMS (WCMS) - WCMS allows non-technical users to make changes to an existing website with little or no training. A WCMS typically requires an experienced coder to set up and add features, but is primarily a website maintenance tool for non-technical administrators.
  3. Mobile CMS (MCMS) - MCMS is still a neglected area of development simply because it needs to be compliant to certain restrictions that come within the framework of mobile web surfing. The use of Ajax and Javascript is limited or even non-existent on certain mobile platforms, limiting the content delivery over mobile technology. It is not that mobile CMS systems are not possible, but require a lot more use of cascading style sheets (CSS) to obtain the same functionality of Ajax and JavaScript capable web content delivery. The big cluprit here is the Windows platform being non CSS 2.1 compliant. Modern browsers (Explorer is actually not modern) such as Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, Flock and Chrome could easily handle mobile CMS systems.
  4. Component CMS (CCMS) - manage content at a granular level (component) rather than at the document level. Each component represents a single topic, concept or asset (e.g., image, table, product description). Components are assembled into multiple content assemblies (content types) and can be viewed as components or as traditional documents. The granular approach is the most uncommon of the CMS systems since the maintenance and implementation level requires substantial web savvy knowledge.