Content Management System

A Content Management System (or CMS) is an automated method of managing a websites content. Using a CMS has many advantages for users, mainly being that there is very little knowledge required to set one up and use one as all of the features are user friendly and the software is specifically designed for users with little experience or ones that do not wish to set up a full website.

One of the best features that a Content Management System has is the fully customizability, with the full amount of knowledge users can edit the CSS stylesheets which are very simple to understand. CMS systems are usually created with the PHP programming language and HTML markup language which makes them extremely web friendly, as one of the popular uses for them is Blogging which has become a very popular topic. A downside is that without any PHP, Programming or knowledge of CSS it is extremely difficult to customize the website in your prefered colours or with your images. The CMS that I tested was named CMSimple, and during my testing of it I found that even though it can be very difficult to manually edit and easy to break there is a lot of web support for it and other CMS’s as they are quite popular, during my research I found a very useful website dotcomwebdesign which hosts lots of themes for CMSimple which makes customizing a lot easier.

There are lots of different CMS systems available on the internet, a lot of businesses use them when there business is not technical and there may not be a lot of IT knowledge within the firm. One of the most popular CMS’s around is the Wiki system which is most popularly used by Wikipedia.org, which has the largest amount of support around for it.

Although CMS has a large and dedicated audience a lot of businesses and people are unaware of it’s existance, so many websites have been created to inform and explain to businesses the advantages and disadvantages of CMS to businesses. Steptwo.com.au uses this diagram to show the simplicity of a Content Management System which is just Create Content > Manage Content > Publish Content, instead of creating an entire website which could be difficult to manage especially for inexperienced web users

Diagram of a CMS system.

Source: http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_what/index.html

In conclusion a Content Management System is a good alternative to the other systems that are similar, such as: Blog (Thingamablog, typo) and RSS feeds. Unlike others it does not have to be live on the internet to work, they are very popular within businesses for Intranet and across networks including LAN and WAN. CMS systems are new to the market and needs to establish a larger audience as it can be better than popular alternatives and can be used for the reasons that other software is used for, it is simple and easy to set up and fully customizable allowing the input of all different forms of multimedia such as flash, animation, videos and images with many different alternatives for software and thousands of websites for support.
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