What is a Content Management System (CMS)
Web content management systems are infrastructure that is generically built for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing web content. A web content management system may support the following features:
- Identification of all key users and their content management roles.
- The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types.
- Definition of the content work flow tasks, often coupled with event messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content.
- The ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content.
- The ability to publish the content so that it archives and is searchable.
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What is Open Source?
This is an important milestone in computer coding technology. Open source software is publicly shared intellectual property whose source code is available for everyone to view, enabling other people to modify the code if necessary. One of the best known, open source software applications today is the Linux operating system. All of the source code is “open” and available for any and all developers to add to and improve, on the condition that it remains open and free – the software cannot be sold (although “packaging” of the software, with manuals, CD’s, etc. is permitted). Other popular open source applications include the Firefox web browser, the Apache web server, and the MySQL database format.
Open-Source CMS
For our clients we use Drupal or WordPress as a CMS which allows our clients to have a fully functional content management platform. Then why are we needed? Well free doesn’t mean simple!
Drupal is powerful yet complex to install and configure and quite time-consuming. However, the end product provides incredible options. It’s much like building a Ferrari from scratch, not everyone can do it themselves.
WordPress is simple to use yet can be confusing to configure and does not come with a lot of options right out of the box. However, with the right knowledge of how to put together the correct options, WordPress can be customized to fit your needs. You can choose to just install and use a premade theme, but then you will not stand out from the crowd.
Some of the features available in a Content Management System (CMS) are:
- Self-editable
- Expandable
- RSS feeds
- Polls
- News feeds
- Blogs
- Forums / Discussion Boards
- Wikis
- Forms
- Calendar / Events
- Auto-publishing to the front page
- Affiliate advertising
- Donations setup through 3rd-party vendors
- Multimedia: audio, video, photos
- eNewsletters
- Member Permission Levels
- Content Access permissions
- Flexability of Content Tyoes
- Integration of Social Media
- And So Much More…
