At its base level, a content management system (CMS) manages your content. However, that merely realigns its name.
A content management system will, as a minimum, perform several key tasks:
- Allow you to add, edit, and remove web pages from your website.
- Allow you to manage uploaded content for your site, be it pictures, audio files, video clips, or other content.
- Restrict access as to who can add, edit, and remove content from your site.
Additionally, depending upon the system it may also:
- Allow you to edit your theme, AKA the design, from within the CMS.
- Schedule content to be published, and possibly removed.
- Restrict access to content based upon user permissions.
- Be expandable to allow you to use new features via plugins that other people/companies have written.
Content management systems vary in complexity and price. There are many free versions that do little more than provide a place for you to write web pages within a browser and give you a basic theme to display to your users.
High end content management systems will allow for multiple administrators with varying security roles. Sometimes these roles are site wide, other times they cover just a set of pages or categories. They will provide a way to upload and track media content including providing versioning of the content so you can easily update all references to a file across the website.
What is a Content Management System was originally found on Access 2 Learn
