Content Management System (CMS)

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?
Content Management Systems are software packages that keep track of every piece of content on your Intranet or Website. Very similar to a library, where books are kept and information on how to access them is available.

Further, the content itself could be articles, documents, images or photos, music, and videos. Simply just about anything you could think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. Since the CMS manages all your content, you don't have to.

How does it work?
In order to have a good understanding of how CMS work a few concepts must be understood first:

Metadata
Metadata is a set of information that relates to each piece of content stored in your system database. It describes what the content is all about, how it associates to other content in the system. In a nut shell it is information about information. Finally, metadata is what is used by search engines for instance for searching and indexing.

Template
All CMS use templates in order to display the content stored to the end-user. This is the way the stored content will look on your website or intranet pages. Usually those are created by web designers and managed separately from your content.

One could describe the templates as blank versions of your page types. At publishing time, the CMS fills in those blank versions with the content stored in the system for final presentation. One could design a set of templates for presenting different type of content or sections of their website.

Separation of Content & Presentation
When creating content the CMS isolates the content data from the content formatting and metadata. However, it keeps track of the relationship between all three parts. This is important as provides portability to your content. Since your content is not attached to the format then you can reuse your content in any other way you wish.

How does all of this integrate?

Workflow of Contente Managment Systems (CMS)

The heart of any CMS is some kind of a repository, commonly known as a database. This is where the content is stored ready for publishing. Additionally, each CMS has what’s called the back-end and the front-end. The back-end is where content authors create their content, store it and categorise it using metadata management tools. The front-end however is what’s accessed by your audience. This is where your content is presented by means of one of the templates stored in your CMS. The whole process is managed by the CMS.

Benefits of using CMS
There are many benefits for using a CMS. To name a few: