What is a Content Management System?

In today’s information driven world, content is created almost everywhere, every time by everybody. Be it a small business or large enterprise, an armature’s weblog or a professional website or a printed publication for that matter, content is generated from innumerable number of sources. Most of this content is unstructured in nature and is hard to manage in the way it is. Content Management System is a type of computer software that allows all this unstructured, unmanaged content to be sorted out into manageable, usable entities. The software lets its users create, edit, manage and search the content from a well defined user interface. And since computers can provide unprecedented level of automation in generating formatted outputs, this becomes an added advantage of using a content management system. The content can include computer related files, multimedia content, electronic versions of printed content, Web contents etc.

Apart from these things, from the security perspective, A CMS supports the notion of user accounts with different level of access rights over the content to provide controlled access to the stored data. Role based account management is also present sometimes which defines access control on the basis of a particular set of permissions according to the role of the user.

Versioning is supported in CMSs so that different versions of same documents and files can be stored without any ambiguity. And all this content can be published to repository like a company's index for further use.

CMS systems also support the separation of layout of content from its organizing semantics which facilitate the one content - many views functionality.  For example, the CMS can apply font, color and other display specific attributes differently according to the context, to the same data.

CMS systems are generally written in a high level language but that varies according to the type of CMS. For example, there are Enterprise CMS systems which are used by big organizations to manage their internal data properly while the Web based CMS systems are generally used to provide facility to manage content of a website in a specific format like a blog etc that help non technical users to manage the web content effortlessly. A third type of CMS system exists which is classified as Component CMS. These work on the contents of other document and organize unstructured data in it in a usable form.

Examples of CMS systems include blogs, mash-ups, wikis as well as in-house enterprise data management solutions etc.