What is a Website Content Management System (cms)?

A website builder is software that enables someone with no computer programming knowledge and no website design skills to be able to create a website with a look and content tailored just for that person. The heart of any website builder is a content management system, or CMS. As a software engineer, I know about the technical details of developing content management systems. As the author of numerous programmming books, including several books in the "For Dummies" series, I know about describing technical information to non-technical people. In this article I'll skip the programming aspects of a CMS and instead provide you with some basic, generalized information about content management systems.

A website can be created without a content management system (CMS). In fact, most small websites don't use a CMS. A website developer defines a web page by typing the content - the words that are to appear on the web page - in a text file. The developer applies tags - special sequences of characters - throughout the file to provide the desired formatting. The formatting can be effects such as adding bold or italics to text. This non-CMS approach to creating a website is fine and dandy for a very small website that is meant to be static. A static website is one that doesn't change. Once the look and content of the site is established, the site is basically "done." If at a later date the website owner does want changes to the site, making those changes can be time-consuming. The website owner needs to manually edit the files that make up the website pages, typing in additions and corrections, and making sure that any changes don't negatively affect the layout, or look, of the site.

The purpose of a content management system is to make the initial creation of a website easy, and to make future changes and additions to the website easy as well. The CMS consists of an administration area that is a number of pages of the website where the website owner can add, remove, or change the text and graphics that serve as the content of the rest of the website. The website owner uses a username and password to log in to the administration area (so that no one else can make changes to his or her website), and then chooses a website page to work on. To add a paragraph of text, the website owner simply types text in a text box. To add a graphic image, the website owner simply clicks an Upload button to upload a graphic file from his or her computer to the website.

To the website owner a CMS appears to be one thing - the pages of the website that act as an administration area. There is, though, one other very important and complex component to the CMS - a database. In general terms, a database is something that stores data, or information. A phone book can be considered a database in that it stores information - each entry, or record, consists of a person's name, address, and telephone number. In computer terms, a database is a collection of related information, or records, that are stored electronically. A database allows for the fast storage, retrieval, and updating of the information it holds.

A CMS stores a website's content - the text and graphics displayed by the pages of the website - in a database. Every time a visitor to the website visits a web page, the visitor's web browser retrieves the proper content for that page from the database, and displays that content on the page. If the website owner uses the CMS administration area to make a change to a page, what he or she is doing is making a change to the information in the database. Because every time a visitor arrives at the page the page information comes from the database, any visitor to the page will see the newly changed content.

To summarize, a CMS consists of an easy-to-use administration area that allows for fast, simple updating of a website's content, while hiding the technical details of how a database stores and retrieves that content.