Denise, our lovely receptionist, read my blog post
Carry on up the Internet: The Curse of
Gerald Scarfe and asked what a Content Management
System is. So, always on the look out for something to post
about, I thought I’d write an explanation…
So what is a Content Management System
(CMS)? Like a Ronnie
Corbett monologue (opens new window) I’ll come to
that in a minute. First let’s have a look at how all web
sites used to be made (and many still are). Every page on the
site had to be made using an editor like Wordpad on Windows or Vi
on Unix. You had to know how to write HTML markup code and
later CSS. If you added a new page and wanted it to be
included in the navigation on every page you had to edit each of
the files. Then you had to use FTP to copy all the files from
your computer to your web server. It was a clumsy process
that needed technical training to perform. When you should
have been worrying about the stuff that made up the page, you were
worrying about making sure the page didn’t break.
Later software like Adobe Dreamweaver and
Microsoft Frontpage came along that made some of this easier.
These still combined working on the site design and the
content. You also still needed to FTP the files to the web
server. Everyday users working on content still had to have
special skills or pass content on to people who had those
skills.
So what is a Content Management System?
If you look on Wikipedia you’ll see several different things listed
under Content Management Systems. Strictly speaking I’m just
talking about a Web Content Management System. This kind of
CMS is computer software that makes running a web site
easier. It automates a lot of the routine work so a user can
worry about their content and not worry about other stuff.
Many run as a secure, private part of the web site so an
organisation’s staff can work on the site from different offices,
home or anywhere else they can access the World Wide Web.
A good CMS makes it easy to add new pages and
to edit existing ones. It will include an editor for writing
the content that goes into pages so a user doesn’t need to know
HTML or CSS. It will also automate tasks like making a site’s
navigation, producing a sitemap and listing latest news articles on
the home page. It will take care of the look of the
site. It can make the site meets standards for accessibility
and the underlying html code. It can make pages that will
work well with search engines.
Other features include the ability to add
extra features to the site like video players, interactive maps or
feeds from a new site. They can include delegation and
workflow so that different staff can have different levels of
authority to work on the web site. One user might be an
author who writes content, another an editor who checks it and a
third a publisher who approves it once the editor says it’s ready
to go.
So what is a Content Management System?
In a nutshell a CMS lets the people who make the content for your
web site, make your web site easily.