Content Management Systems
A Web content management system is a software system that provides website authoring, collaboration, and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage website content with relative ease. A robust CMS provides the foundation for collaboration, offering users the ability to manage documents and output for multiple author editing and participation.
Most systems use a Content Repository or a database to store page content, metadata, and other information assets that might be needed by the system.
A presentation layer displays the content to website visitors based on a set of templates. The templates are sometimes XSLT files.
Most systems use server side caching to improve performance. This works best when the CMS is not changed often but visits happen regularly.
A CMS allows non-technical users to make changes to a website with little training. A CMS typically requires a systems administrator and/or a web developer to set up and add features, but it is primarily a website maintenance tool for non-technical staff.
The Administrator organises a contract with a webhosting company. They provide remote server, remote storage space and the software needed to serve webpages to internet users. This will be a LAMP, MAMP or WAMP stack, LAMP standing for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The Developer uploads a copy of the CMS to the server using FTP from his development machine- that will be his laptop or local host where has already installed the CMS and the LAMP/MAMP/WAMP stack. He will do the development on his local host, and when the client is satisfied, the new site will be uploaded to the remote server, it will be tested and will go live. The client will attend a training program, and insist that any staff that need to add content do so too. The client will interact with the website through a browser.
There are several popular free opensource content management systems- each with its strengths and each with its weaknesses.There is no best CMS — there's only best fit given the context. Over the last four years The American book publisher, Packt Publishing, issued annual awards for this category of software. CMS made Simple has won once. Other system with which they compared it include Drupal, WordPress, eZ Publish and Joomla!.CMSimple is now dated.
Read more about this topic: CMS Made Simple
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