Content Management System (CMS)

Content management system (CMS) - information system or a computer program with simple and convenient user interface, used to provide and organize a joint process of creating, editing and managing content without special programming knowledge.

Main functions

• Providing tools for creating content, and organizing collaborative work;
• Content management: storage, version control, compliance with access mode, flow control of documents, etc.;
• Publishing;
• The presentation of information in a form convenient for navigation and searching.

The content management system can contain a wide variety of data: documents, films, photographs, phone numbers, scientific data, and so on. Such a system is often used to store, manage, review and publish documentation.

Version control is one of its main advantages when the content is changed by a group of people.

Types

In general, content management systems are divided into:

• The Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS)
• Web Content Management System (WCMS)

The term CMS replaced WCMS, becoming a synonym for the website management system.

Such CMS allows you to manage the text and graphic content of a website, providing the user with an interface for working with the content of the site, convenient tools for storing and publishing information, and automating the processes of placing information in databases and issuing it to HTML.

There are many ready-made content management systems, including free ones. They can be divided into three types according to the mode of operation:

• Generate pages on request. Systems of this type work on the basis of the link "Editing module → Database → Presentation module". The presentation module generates a page with content when it is requested, based on information from the database. The information in the database is modified using the editing module. Pages are newly created by the server at each request, which in turn creates an additional load on the system resources.
• Generate pages when editing. Systems of this type serve for editing pages that, when making changes to the content of the site, create a set of static pages.
• The mixed type. As the name implies, it combines the advantages of the previous two. Can be implemented by caching - the presentation module generates the page once, in the future it is loaded several times faster from the cache. The cache can be updated automatically, after a certain time period or when making changes to certain sections of the site, or manually by the administrator's command. Another approach is to save certain information blocks at the stage of editing and build a page from these blocks when the user requests the corresponding page.

Most of the modern CMS are implemented as a visual (WYSIWYG) editor - a program that creates HTML code from a special simplified markup that allows the user to easily format the text.