What is a Content Management System (CMS)?
A CMS is a software program that provides simple controls for building websites and for organizing, formatting, publishing, distributing and controlling access to website content. They also provide an easy way to archive your web pages when it time to replace or delete them. In addition, it provides the ability to manage the structure of the site, the appearance of the published pages, and the navigation provided to the users.
To the layperson this might sound like rocket science, but the CSM will allow you to manage your website without knowing HTML or CSS, let alone programming languages like java, javascript or Cold Fusion.
Who Needs a Content Management System?
A CMS becomes a necessity for organizations with a large website (or multiple sites). As you can imagine, maintaining a large website can be a daunting task and can get out of of hand quickly.
If you have several dozens to hundreds of pages of content, how will you keep the content in them current? How easy will it be to search through that content to find the page(s) you want to update? Have you forgotten about one, two or several pages on your site that no longer have links to them?
What was on the site last week, or last year? Depending on what kind of activity your organization is involved with, this could be a very important issue and a nightmare to keep straight.
In addition to these basic requirements common to all organizations that have large websites, our CMS of choice, Drupal, has many features that you might find very useful.
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