What is a Content Management System?

As its name suggests, a CMS is a system for managing content. This seems to be at first fairly simple, but there is much confusion about what a CMS is, and what these systems actually do. Most people realize they are useful somehow, but unsure of how they can actually help a business, and it's usually these businesses that do not understand the potential of enhancing the sharing of information amongst their staff.

What is Content?

Before talking about managing content, we need to first clearly define what we mean by content. Content is basically information, whether it is text, images, video, etc., anything that can be displayed on a page is classified as content.

Individual items of content can be combined to form documents. A CMS deals with the individual items of content and a Document Management System (DMS) can handle the entire document. We will take a closer look at Document Management Systems later on in the chapter. Some systems combine the two: managing content as well as documents. Web pages for the intranet would be managed by the CMS for example, whereas documents, such as Microsoft Word Documents for example, would be managed by the DMS part of the system.

Organizing Content

CMS manages information, and is responsible for storing it, categorizing it, and displaying it. This allows the staff to focus on the information itself and keeping it accurate, without having to worry about the technicalities of adding, displaying, and storing the information.