An Overview of Content Management System

• admin
• 3 Comments

Content Management System is an application which is designed to create, improve and manage the text. It has simplified the complex process of publishing content on web and Intranet. In CMS, data can be in any form – text, images, movies, scientific data etc. It has made the things so easy that even a lay man can create text and multi media rich web pages using this brilliant application. Apart from its rich contribution in designing and publishing web pages, CMS is also used to perform tasks like:

-Helps in easy storage and retrieval of data
-Helps in avoiding duplicate input
-Ease the work of report writing
-Allows  access to data based on users role

Types of CMS -  Broadly speaking, there are five main kinds of Content Management System.

1. Enterprise CMS (ECMS) -  It is concerned with creating, managing and sharing organizational’s information content, hence optimizing the business process of companies. It mingled up with the organization’s applications, ensures continuous flow of content delivery to users, reduces risk and avoid redundancy.
2. Web CMS (WCMS) – As stated above, it has made the work of designing and publishing the content on web far easy so that anybody can create content without having actual knowledge of HTML.
3. Mobile CMS (MCMS) – It helps in storing and delivering content to mobile devices like mobile phones, PDA’s etc.
4. Component CMS (CCMS) – It manages content at granular level.
5. Document CMS (DCMS) – Manages electronic documents or images.

CMS – An Open Source – Open source CMS are available which can be modified for your needs but if you need a more specific application like multi lingual support, automatic link check etc. then a bespoke solution may be more appropriate.

When to use CMS – It actually depends on number of factors that whether you need CMS or not. Like size of the website, volume of traffic received on the concerned website, knowledge and skills of the web masters etc.  Suppose your website is large, so surely there would be lot of material content on website to be managed. So, here comes the role of CMS. It will store the content in a well formatted way efficiently and prepare a quality database out of it. The administrative side of CMS will take care of managing and privacy aspects of database. Even small website would need CMS with time. Next is if you are receiving high traffic on your website. As, it is evident that static pages load faster than dynamic pages. Here also CMS is helpful on loading issue and saves  a lot of time. A CMS is handy when you want to make changes to your website quickly and with none or little previous experience of developing website. It can save your cost of calling your website designing company again and again for doing little little modifications frequently.

Attributes to  CMS  Success – The main feature of CMS is the ease of its usability. Like it is so easy to design layout, publish and deploy. It has proved to be a strong support in case the web masters lack technical knowledge and skills. It is just so simple to learn. It can readily control errors. It also saves cost as anybody can design their own websites and there is no need of hiring any professional for that. Last but not the least, there is portability between various versions and scalability on different platforms. All these factors have led to success of CMS .