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Content Management Systems

A content management system (CMS) is a computer application used to create, edit, manage, search and publish various kinds of Content (media and publishing) digital media and electronic. CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. The content managed may include Computer data files, Image, Audio file, video files, Electronic documents and Web content.

Check out Wikipedia on CMS

Separating structure and presentation

The Template is where you define the structure of a page. The Stylesheets, on the other hand, is where you define how the elements of that structure are presented. The stylesheets that you want to use are then attached to the templates. The markup language for templates is good old HTML.

The stylesheets are using CSS for styling and formatting the HTML elements, instead of doing this directly in the HTML code. This way the structure and the presentation of your pages are separated, the HTML is kept clean and you get many benefits such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and accessability benefits.

The cool thing is that you can actually use one and the same template and get pages that look completely different, only by changing the CSS.((See CSS Zen-Garden CSS Zen Garden for the ultimate example of how the same HTML can be made to look completely different by changing only the CSS.)) .

A CMS may support the following features:

• identification of all key users and their content management roles;
• the ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types;
• definition of workflow tasks for collaborative creation, often coupled with event messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content (For example, a content creator submits a story, which is published only after the copy editor revises it and the editor-in-chief approves it.);
• the ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content;
• the ability to capture content (e.g. scanning);
• the ability to publish the content to a repository to support access to the content (Increasingly, the repository is an inherent part of the system, and incorporates enterprise search and retrieval.);
• separation of content's semantic layer from its layout (For example, the CMS may automatically set the color, fonts, or emphasis of text.).