 CMS or Content Management System(s) come in a variety of styles, CMS applications can range from very simple to extremely complex, but typically they all make use of some form of WYSIWYG content editors. There are literally hundreds of CMS systems available, written in a variety of languages for just about every platform - .Net, Java, Flash, Cold Fusion, PHP, etc... With so many systems available, I will try to give a general overview of the type of functions typically found in most CMS applications, and what a user should come to expect from any reasonably capable system.
The following is a list of basic features often found in a CMS:
* User or Role Management (Administrator, Publisher, User)
* Survey or Form Data Collection
* Basic text publishing (as in news articles, or any text based web page content)
* Image Gallery Management
* Navigation Management (creation of navigation menus)
* Content Versioning (the ability to archive and track site content based on date or time increments)
* Calendaring (a calender of events for a school or church for example)
* Publishing Multimedia Content (videos, music, podcasts, etc...)
The way in which management of content occurs can be done using several different approaches; however, typically you will find the following to be present in almost every system:
Dissection of the standard CMS
* Content Management Application (CMA)
* Meta-data Management Application (MMA)
* Content Delivery Application (CDA)
CMA
In this layer the framework manages the work flow of content. It can be as simple as allowing users to select the content to edit, invoking a text box or in HTML terms a text area for multi-lined content, changing the content and clicking a save button.
CMA Content
Content can be an entire Web page, a paragraph, caption, image, link, and much more. Storing an entire Web page is typically something a document management system does. Compartmentalizing content and dynamically building a Web page is what characterizes a classic CMS most.
MMA
Content alone does not know how to format or pace itself. This is where metadata comes in handy.
The MMA portion stores properties about the content, details that are generally not shown to the end user. Example properties could be coordinates, name of a place holder such as an HTML table cell, style definitions such as bold, font, color, and many more.
Robust CMS applications use template systems. It could be as simple as loading an HTML file with placeholders and doing text replacements, or as complex as creating XML definitions and using XSL to convert it into HTML. The latter case is more for technically savvy people. However, one nice benefit of XSL is that it uses the XPATH language to build the content using various constructs. Basically you have a pseudo language outside of your compiled application that lets you change the look and feel of something without recompiling the system.
CDA
The content delivery application is essentially the Web site. There are many different flavors of how the content can be laid out. Many frameworks force you into a design-pattern. This means that all of the pages have the same master page and all the content components are rectangular, meaning it fits some pre-defined HTML table structure.
Many CMS applications are portal based. Meaning the Website provides a conglomeration of information possibly from third party sources and compartmentalizes them in various components such as calendars, news links, lotto results, weather, and more. These portal sites usually give the end user the ability to re-arrange the content facilitated through a personalization framework.
In the advent of Web 2.0 via technologies such as AJAX coupled with JavaScript and CSS, a couple of portal applications such as Page Flakes let you build the portal by dragging your widgets around.
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