Content Management System

Content Management system also addressed as CMS is a set of tools giving users the flexibility to managing content to be made available to other users for viewing. Generally this tool or application is talked about with the context of web based applications, where the webmaster of the website wish to have a set of tools developed for him/her to offer them full control over the content/information that should be displayed to the visitors of the website.

CMS these days is being used as a very broad term for example if I need to deploy a e-commerce website then I will say I need a CMS driven e-commerce website, which would mean that the webmasters console should have the tools to manage the details of the products I wish to list on my website for selling, or say if I run a photo studio and need a website that will be a photo album I will say I need a website backed with CMS so that I can manage the photographs and there categories. But if I talk like a web developers I will say……. oh you need a CMS for your e-commerce website, which mean that you need tools that will allow you to add new product, edit or delete existing products. There lies the difference for a layman any set of tool that allow them to manage the information will be called a CMS whereas a web developer or designer will call it as the tools developed to manage the listing.

Anyways, CMS these days have become very popular term and anyone & everyone looking for to deploy a website would need it. Getting to the actual definition of CMS which give a set of tools to manage informational content of any application is now getting advanced day by day, there are new additions that are happing to it like, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, which allow the webmasters to be able to HTML formatting of the content while adding and it all happens at the clicks of buttons and there is no need to know HTML to operate these tools. Though these editors do come with option to work on HTML source but is generally used by advanced users who know hyper text markup language. Advancing a step ahead options are added in the CMS that user can even insert pictures, flash files etc while they are entering the text to be displayed on various pages of the website.

Moving a step ahead there are certain products which are complete CMS systems, which not just allow you to manage the information to be displayed on the website but at the same time provide webmasters tools to add new pages, select the template to be used, define the navigation (site map) and linking of various pages of the website. This again is addressed as CMS but actually it a complete suite to deploy your website.

To conclude, I would say CMS literally means a set of tools enabling webmasters to mange the content of the website but this term is now being used as a very broad terms, which includes anything and everything when it comes to managing any sort of information or any vertical of a website.