What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

In this article I will focus on web content management, and will only touch upon broader content issues of the document.

A content management system (CMS) is a web application used to manage work flow needed to collaboratively create, edit, review, index, search, publish and archive various kinds of media and text.

What exactly is a Content Management System? To better understand this, let's briefly look at your common, everyday web page. We will have to talk a little about some of the technology of web pages, but it's worth it to understand the power of a CMS.

To start, let's take a look at the historical development of web pages. Conceptually, there are two aspects to a web page: Its content and the presentation of that content. Over the last decade, there has been an evolution of how these two pieces interact:

Static web pages— A static Web page contains content that displays the same way each time the page is requested from a browser. An example of a static Web page is a help page that contains contact information that does not change frequently. A static store page is created using only HTML.

Cascading Style Sheet web pages—CSS is an extension to basic HTML that allows you to style your web pages. Separation of presentation and content is a common in the cascading style sheet web pages.


Dynamic web pages—A dynamic Web page contains content that is generated when the user requests the page. This content is typically extracted from a database, allowing the store to present the most current information. Content and presentation are separated from the web page itself.

Note : A content management system (CMS) is a necessity when maintaining a large corporate website or intranet. CMS supports the creation, management, distribution, publishing, and discovery of corporate information.