What is a CMS?

Written by Brad Traversy | 11 November 2009

There are many different tools available for web design. Many of todays websites are built with Content Management Systems (CMS). A web CMS is software that is used for creating and managing HTML content. CMS programs are used to control large, dynamic collections of website material. Most CMS use a database to store content. There are open source (free) and premium CMS.

Web CMS programs are great when building a site for someone who has little or no web development knowledge. It allows them to add content to their site easily with a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor. Wysiwyg editors are similar to using Microsoft Word or another word processor program. You do not need to use any kind of html tags or any other coding.

Many CMS programs use automated templates as well. They use standard HTML and XML templates but can be changed at anytime within the CMS backend panel without interfering with the websites code or structure.

There are 3 different types of web CMS:

Offline Processing – These types of CMS programs process all content before the publication of web pages.

Online Processing - These system types apply templates on-demand. HTML may be generated when a user visits the page, or pulled from a cache. They are built live on the web.

Hybrid – These systems use both of the above. Some systems write out executable code (e.g. JSP, ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, or Perl pages) rather than just static HTML, so that the CMS itself does not need to be deployed on every Web server.