Content Management System (CMS)

A CMS or Content Management System is used for the control and editing of content. Content includes electronic files, images and video based media, audio files, electronic documents and web text. The main concept behind a CMS is to make these files available for editing inter-office or over the Internet. A CMS is often used to archive documents as well. Many companies use a CMS to organise and store files in public form. Companies using a CMS can share content with others easily, as most systems are server based. In the case of Joomla it is a CMS based on a web server. A CMS being available on the Internet makes it available to you and your customers constantly and across the whole globe, so, long as there is Internet access. A Joomla CMS is one of the many Content Management Systems (CMS) that includes a "workflow process."

A "Workflow" process is the ability to move documents through a business process of approval. Some Content Management Systems provide the ability to control business flows and processes, like email alerts and automated business document flows. This is ideally a collaborative creation of documents. A CMS or document management system provides the business a way to control and publish to and from group of documents in a logical and organised manner, content, like images and mulitmedia items.

Web content management systems are mainly used to control and publish text based documents likes articles, text documents and information. A CMS is normally able to provide the following features:-

• Import and create documents, videos and other imagery .
• Identify the main users and their roles within the content management system.
• An ability to assign certain roles and rights within the document management system and across differing content types and categories.
• Define management and system workflows, definitions, tasks and possibly even tied in with event messaging so that managers of the content are notified of changes to specific content.
• An ability to record, track and manage many, many versions of the same content or files - a document management system with versioning.
• An ability to publish content to an centralised content archive, to facilitate greater access to the content. More importantly with time, this repository is an vital element of the CMS system, and incorporates search and retrieval methods.
• Some content management systems (CMS) allow for the formatting of certain text within the documents - fonts, colours, layout styles etc.

A website content management system (CMS) is designed to run in the background of a public website. It allows administrators to edit content through an admin panel that is then shown and displays on the public frontend of the website. Often there are several levels of users who have control over the content on the website, these can be super admins, copy writers and editors. Using a special access control system through the web browser creators and editors can manage documents within the CMS. Overall the content management system controls and allows admins to manage workflows and business processes.

Generally all content in the CMS is stored in an online SQL database system. This database system allows for quick and easy access by all applications and also affords strong security and backup capabilities. This kind of system also allows for version control of web pages.

Some examples of CMS:
Drupal: open source content management system.
Jooma: open source content management system.