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Content Management Systems (667 products)

[edit] Brief Description

A content management system (CMS) is an application used to create, manage, archive and remove of information resources from an organized repository. Includes tools for publishing, format management, revision control, indexing, search and retrieval. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to Web sites. A content management system usually has features like import and creation of documents and multimedia material, the ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types, definition of the content workflow tasks, the ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content, the ability to publish the content to a repository to support access to the content.

Synonyms: content management system, CMS

Tags: application, CMS, content management system, software, website management

[edit] Wiki description

Contents
Description Types of content management systems Features Administrator Features Easy to add and edit content Scalable feature sets SEO Optimization Top software How to choose Events Communities See also

Description

A content management system (also called CMS or content management application) is a software application used to manage the content of a website. It usually allows the authors to create, edit and remove content without having programming or even HTML knowledges.

Most of the CMSs store the content into a SQL database and the design of the website is generally controlled trough a template system. For installing and adding new functionalities most of them need a experienced user, usually the webmaster, but there are primarily website maintenance tools for not-technical administrators.

Types of content management systems

By license:

open-source (GPL / BSD / Apache License / LGPL)
commercial

By price:

free (open-source or freeware)
commercial, low cost (< $5000)
commercial, medium cost ($5000 - $15000)
commercial, high cost (> $15000)

By the technologies used:

Java / Java Script + XML + MySQL / Oracle / SQL Server / PostgreSQL / Flat-file database
PHP + MySQL / PostgreSQL / Oracle / Flat-file database
Perl + MySQL / Perl DBI / Flat-file database
ASP.NET + ASP.NET Microsoft SQL Server
Pyton + MySQL / PostgreSQL / Oracle database

Features

A Web Content Management System usually provides the following key features:

Administrator Features

Template System - Most of the Content Management Systems support multiple templates, that can be automatically applied to different pages of the website. When you have a template applied to a group of content on a site if you want to make a change in it you have to make the change in only one place by editing the template. Also, using templates separates the visual presentation of the website and its content, so the responsible of adding the content doesn't have to be a designer or programmer.
Themes / Skins - Usually, the CMS vendor or the community offer themes or skins that can be used to change the look of the website
Advertisement management - includes banner management systems and integration of ad servers
History of changes and Trash management - There are situations when the authors (the content editors of the website) make changes or delete content by mistake. It is important to be able to reverse any change made by a user or editor.

Easy to add and edit content

One of the main purposes of the CMS applications is to actualize the content very fast and without technical knowledges. For that different applications include features like:

WYSIWYG Editor
Source editor
Image resizing
Drag-N-Drop Content
Spell Checker
Menus System
Scheduling / expiration of content publication
Archive
Different user levels

Scalable feature sets

Most CMS application can be extended having plugin or modules systems that can be easily installed. Most of the open source projects and some of the commercial ones have big communities developing plugins for extending the CMS with functionalities like:

Blog system
Chat
Contact Management
Events Calendar and Management
FAQ Management
File Distribution
Forum
Graphs and Charts
Guest Book
Job Posting
Contact Form
Link Management
Matrices
My Page / Dashboard
Polls / Surveys / Tests / Quizzes
Photo Gallery
Products Management
Search Engine
Shopping Cart
Site Map
User Contributions

SEO Optimization

The Seo options of a CMS are very important for any webmaster since most of the visitors of a website comes for search engines. Standard Search Engine Optimization features are:

Metatags: keywords and metadescription for all the website, for categories, for single pages
URL rewriting / friendly URLs
Statistics

Top software

The Open Source CMS Award for 2006 winners are:

	http://www.iterating.com/products/Joomla#datasheet Joomla! - One of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, Joomla! appeared as a result of a fork of Mambo between the trademark holder of the Mambo name and all of the core developers. The developers rewrote the code making it more secure and improved the performance with a caching feature. Quickly, the huge community wrote plugins for any task you may want.

	Drupal - Very flexible and extendable, Drupal allows to an user or community to publish, manage and organize a big variety of content. It was created mainly for community websites (like blogs for example), but it can be also used for complex portals.

Other important open source CMS are:

From the commercial application, the most popular and appreciated CMS are:

	RedDot - Developed by a german corporation (RedDot Solutions), RedDot is specialized in creating multilingual websites and it supports multi-channel publishing. It is a good alternative to the open source solutions, for big companies that want to be sure they use the best technologies available and they want to get the best support from the vendor that they can get. This solution is pretty expensive, the price starting at $55.000, but is one of the top CMS.

	http://www.iterating.com/products/Community-Server#datasheet Community Server - Community Server is one of the most complete solutions available offered by Telligent Systems. It allows to create online communities including features like discussion forums, email lists, newsgroups, blogs, file galleries and many others.

How to choose

On the Content Management Systems market there are many important players asking for supremacy, but what usually matters the most for any website creator is to have all the features he needs and to be able to get support quickly.

For big companies, that can afford to spend a lot for a content management system, and that can't afford to risk anything is better to choose a commercial application, getting support directly from the vendor, even if sometimes they have to extra-pay for it. Also, another strong argument for choosing a commercial product is the security problem, as the open-source / free solutions have many issues in this area.

For small companies or individual uses that want to create small or medium websites with a low budget, almost every time the open source solutions are the best choice. The biggest advantage is that most of the open source software have big communities testing them, reporting bugs and creating plugins and modules. Also, it's easy to get support online on forums and mailing lists.

Events

Documentation and Training East Summit - http://www.doctrain.com
Content Manager Days - http://www.cmdays.de
O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) Conference - http://en.oreilly.com/toc2008/public/content/home
CMPros - Content Management Professionals Summits - http://www.cmpros.org/events/summits
Giblane's Conference in Content Management http://gilbaneboston.com
The Open Source Content Management System Summit - http://www.oscms-summit.org

Communities

CMPros - Content Management Professionals Community - http://www.cmpros.org
Discussions about CMS on CMSMatrix - http://www.cmsmatrix.org/discussion
WebDevelopers Forum - http://www.webdeveloper.com
Dev Shed Forums - Open Source web developement Forum - http://forums.devshed.com