Maintaining and Evolving Successful Commercial Web Sites

6

Content Management Systems (CMS)

To manage all of the processes and content as discussed, you need a content management system (CMS). In this section, we look in more detail at what makes up a typical CMS, how it works, and how to go about choosing one.

6.1 What Is a Content Management System (CMS)?

It is easiest to understand a CMS in terms of how it maps to the content life cycle. You will note that Figure 6.1, which shows the three main parts of a CMS, is very similar to the earlier diagram of the content life cycle. The “create” wording has been dropped from the first part of the system because a CMS does not actually create content. Ideally, it integrates with authoring tools to a high degree and provides content capture interfaces such ...