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 for more advanced features like:
- Allowing you to edit your theme, AKA the design, from within the CMS directly.
- Schedule when content should be published, and possibly removed.
- Restrict access to content based upon user permissions, i.e. if they are signed in or not.
- 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. While there are many free versions that do little more than provide a place for you to write web pages within a web browser. There are also 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 CMS was originally found on Access 2 Learn
