Content Management System, also known as CMS: Is a CMS Right for You?

A Content Management System (CMS) is a software system used to assist its users in the content management process. CMS facilitates the organization, control and publication of a large number of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates collaboration on document creation. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to facilitate the tasks needed to publish web content on websites.

Web content management systems are often used to store, control, version, and publish industry-specific documentation such as news articles, user guides, technical manuals, sales guides and marketing brochures. A content management system can support the following features:

Import and creation of documents and multimedia material.
Identification of all key users and their content management roles.
The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different categories or types of content.
Defining content workflows, often along with incident notifications, so that content managers are alerted to changes in content.
Ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content.
Ability to publish content in a repository to support access to content. Increasingly, the repository is an inherent part of the system and includes search and recovery of the business.
Some visitor management and check-in system allow the textual aspect of the content to be separated from the format to some extent. For example, CMS can automatically set default color, fonts, or designs.
There are a growing number of webmasters who use CMS as the basis for their sites. The reason why a CMS is so popular is that it does not require programming knowledge, there are many different topics already written, and there are many different modules that can be installed to expand the capabilities of the CMS.

These modules allow you to add things like guestbooks, site maps, e-commerce, photo galleries and more without knowing how to write programs.

There are some things that disable some webmasters when thinking about content management systems, and these are:

The systems are based on databases, and often their loading is slower than on other sites, especially if many modules are used.
These systems are usually not as friendly to search engines as other types of sites.
The central system and the various modules are often written by different programmers, so there is no guarantee that the coding is as clean or secure in each module you use.
You know your skill set, your comfort level when working with different technologies, the focus on your site and the experience you want your visitors to have, so you know about Drupal, PostNuke, Joomla! Or one of the other content management systems adapts to your needs.