A Content Management System (CMS) is used for designing websites and keeping them actively updated. A content manager helps creating dynamic and editorial content for a website in a easier and faster way. The content manager is attending every step of the web content creation, from a webpage or article validation until the posting rules management.
The main characteristic of a CMS tool is to separate the content of the container. You can therefore update text or image content independently from the website graphic structure and vice versa.
Articles and content are usually stored in a database and templates can help define the presentation and the content layout. The content manager will organise and classify the information associating them with metadata (author, title, etc.).
Content management consists therefore in creating, managing and publishing, in a faster way, pages and articles through an easy user backoffice interface so that a writer can be totally independent without any HTML background knowledge.
There are many CMS solutions on the market, proprietary and Open Source, such as WordPress, Joomla, Prestashop, Magnento, etc. Every CMS has been developed to create and animate a special type of website. You can find developed and adapted CMS in these fields:
– ecommerce websites (order, payment or delivery management system),
– dynamic websites, booklet website,
– institutional site, showcase website (instant updates, interactivity with users)
– image galleries or portfolios (adding photos, management of categories),
– collaborative work platforms (intranet website, teamwork management)
– private and public forums (access management, management of categories),
– blogs (easier publication, publishing chain management, comments management),
– teaching community portals and social medias (downloads, rights and clusters management).
The main reasons why using a CMS is useful are:
– an efficient content management,
– a preserved graphic unity within the website,
– an automatic menu navigation and links generation,
– a users administration and a distribution of roles,
– an editorial content decentralisation,
– a workflow publishing chain,
– the possibility to organise and plan content production and publication.
Using a CMS system is the best solution to feed and update your website, the only
negative side is a relative slowness to access to database and that can be seen on non-
optimised pages in terms of load time.
For further information, contactus or check out our work in content management with Phyathai.