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What Are Content Management Systems?

Simply, content management systems can be defined as the systems that help manage content, but technically, content management systems are the programs that help to create, edit, manage and finally publish (in a number of formats) a variety of content (such as text, graphics, video, documents etc), and any other electronic content.

Actually, content management systems are the computer software programs that are used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. Often, content management systems are used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation, such as news, articles, operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures.

Content management systems can help managing computer files, image media files, audio files, electronic documents, and Web content. The content management system programs that are usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content are called web content management systems (WCMS or Web CMS).

The web content management systems are the software systems that are used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). These content management systems help in web content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions. They facilitate document control, auditing, editing, and timeline management.

The web content management systems provide authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease of use. Some of the key features of web content management systems include automated templates, easily editable content, scalable feature sets, web standards upgrades, workflow management, document management, and content virtualization. The web content management systems are often used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images).

There are three major types of web content management systems – offline processing systems, online processing systems, and hybrid systems. The Offline processing systems pre-process all content, applying templates before publication to generate Web pages; the examples are sagar Vignette CMS and Bricolage. The Online processing systems produce pages and apply templates on-demand; the examples are Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress, Zikula, and Plone. Hybrid systems combine the offline and online approaches; the example is Blosxom.

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