Content Management Systems

Your CMS

A content management system (CMS) enables businesses to create, store and organise content, and to publish it to digital platforms. This may include their own and other people’s websites, mobile phone websites and digital interactive television. A CMS separates content and its presentation.

Content comes from databases. These may be editorial content (often called ‘articles’) from the CMS database, or structured product databases containing media such as text, images, audio and video files, and document files. They may come from the business’s own CMS and databases, or from those of external partners. Presentation is carried out by templates, which are stored separately from the content. It is the combination of selected content – usually several content items – and a selected template that defines how it is presented to the customer on any given platform
All reasonably complete CMSs will:

• Reduce the work needed to create and maintain a website. If text, a name or a picture needs changing, it is changed only once in the CMS system, even though it may appear in many different places
• Enable you to share content across a range of separate websites. These may include all your language/market/theme sites for customers
• Allow many authors throughout an organisation to contribute and maintain content, without needing technical skills. Users can be given any combination of access and permission, so security and quality of the output can be controlled
• Maintain consistency of layout, by the use of standard input templates
• Help the users to insert meta data (tagging) for content items. This is essential for search engine optimisation, internal search, and accessibility. It also helps with site management, for example by noting the author and approval level, as well as quality control, for example by specifying the review date
• Help the editor to organise the content:
• • To see where a piece of content is to be used
  • To look at a complete page and see where the pieces of content are coming from, even if they do not have rights to edit all the pieces
• Items can be given an in-house name within the system that makes sense to the system users even though it may not to the outside audience, who will not see it
• Relations between items can be set and will not be broken even if names are changed (which should be avoided nevertheless), because every item has a unique identifier within the system

Content can be annotated, with the notes being visible in some published versions but not others. For example, there may be a contact address in an organisation that is for staff use only. The template used for an intranet page can show this information, but the one for the customer-facing site hides it. Allow the creation and amendment of templates for pages or parts of pages into which the content is fed. This provides consistency of style as well as saving time. The task usually requires more advanced skills.

More sophisticated CMSs will:

• Provide a workflow system that defines the authoring and approval process for different kinds of user and content
• Provide staging before publishing, to synchronise interdependent new items
• Output the same content to other formats, for example to web, mobile device, or digital television
• Allow one site to be copied for other sites, using a master or ‘parent’ page or site to form the basis of a number of subsidiary ‘child’ sites (sometimes known as ‘blueprinting’). The child can then be maintained in line with the parent
• Make version control easier, and provide ‘roll-back’ if needed, so that a site can revert to previous content, for example after an event. Audit trails will also record what content was authored and approved, when and by whom
• React to the website user actions, and serve content and presentation to rules set by the editor