A CMS is a Content Management System. This is a collection of procedures that are used in order to manage the workflow within a collaborative environment. While they can be either computer-based or manual in nature, the term is most commonly used online to refer to management of online content such as documents, pictures, movies, message boards, calendars and related information. Web content management systems are software systems that provide collaboration, administration and website authoring tools that allow for the creation and management of websites and their content with a relative amount of ease.
Most content management systems rely on a database in order to store content, artifacts and metadata that the system may require. Content can be stored as XML or in MySQL in order to facilitate, to reuse and to enable a flexible selection of presentation offers. There is always a front end or presentation layer that displays the content to viewers of the website based on templates, which are sometimes but not always XSLT files. Many content management systems rely on server side caching in order to boost performance.
Some of the benefits of a content management system on the web include automated templates, scalable expansion, easily editable content, scalable sets of features, web standards upgrades, management of workflow, collaboration capabilities, ease of delegation, content visualization, document management, versioning, multilingual capabilities and content syndication. There are a wide variety of different types of CMS options to choose from. For example, for Ecommerce purposes, Zen Cart and osCommerce are two CMS options. For blogging, WordPress is a popular content management system. Joomla, Wikipedia, Wikia and Mambo are all examples of content management systems.
Content management systems are beneficial in many situations, allowing for collaboration by a variety of different users and allowing for multiple users to create, edit and remove content as needed.