What is a CMS?
Posted on October 22, 2007
Filed Under e-Business
The letters CMS is an abbreviation for Content Management System. Knowing what the letters stand for gives a clearer idea of what it is but still it’s necessary to define what it is that a Content Management System actually does. Yes, it does just what it says, i.e. it’s a system that manages content but what is content, what is meant by “management” and what is a system?
OK, I’ll try to clarify it a bit more by defining each word to create a clearer definition of a Content Management System(CMS).
Content can be any electronic information. So things like text, images, video, sound, or other electronic files would be considered as content.
If content is any form of electronic information, then content management is the management of such content by combining process, functions and workflows in a way that its electronic storage is deemed to be managed rather than unmanaged.
A system is considered a to be tool or a combination of tools that makes it possible to produce the desired output using the managed content efficiently and effectively.
So we can say that:
“A CMS is a tool that enables a variety of (centralised) technical and (de-centralised) non technical staff to create, edit, manage and finally publish (in a number of formats) a variety of content (such as text, graphics, video, documents etc), whilst being constrained by a centralised set of rules, process and workflows that ensure coherent, validated electronic content.”
Just as a document management system manages documents and an asset management system/tools manage assets, so does a web content management system manage the content of a website. There are however many different types of CMS but the type I’ll be focusing on is for the management of web content.
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