Overview of CMS

A Content Management System (CMS) in general allows you to "dynamically" handle pages in a web site.

To illustrate this, compare a CMS with more traditional static sites. With static pages, each time you want to change or update something on your site, you have to pay somebody to edit the site. With a dynamic CMS, you do not need to do this. If you want to add an article, you just go to your site with a web browser (from any computer connected to the Internet), and click on Add Article or to submit the latest news you go to Add News. From clicking on that link a box appears, and you can type or cut & paste the article into the box, then click on the Save button to publish the data on the web.

To summarise: with ordinary, static web pages, you have to do a lot of HTML editing and uploading each time you want to change something on your site - this would normally cost a lot. With a CMS, you can forget all this, and just change your site by surfing to it and clicking on the links for updating your site.

Benefits of CMS Sites

Some major benefits & features of CMS are:

• Developed sites are self-sustaining – no need to pay for additional content inclusion from external
  companies.
• Site structure, design, editing, and the submission of site content can be separated for easy administration
  of material.
• Sites are scalable, so many people can contribute the support site.
• Sites are flexible, there are can be easily altered, extended, or modified.
• Customisable layouts for each site. 
• Site development is Open Source (collaborative code) allowing robust, modular, consistent, security and
  standards aware feature-rich software with a number of support options. 
• Completely database driven site engine with daily content backups. 
• Extendable through the use of third party modules. 
• Powerful security module for multi-level user/administrator logins. 
• Dynamic forum (bulletin board) and poll for on -the-spot results. 
• Fully editable and manageable news, links, downloads, FAQ, and services sections.
• News feed manager – access to news feeds from other related sites.
• Banner Ad manager – ability to sell advertising on your site.
• Detailed site statistics indicates browser & operating system, top news articles
  

Technical Features of CMS Sites

Sites can offer the following features that can be added or removed depending on the style and function of
the site:

• Articles management for news and technical updates.
• Live support can be enabled on any site linking a user directly to a support engineer online.
• Bulletin Board (or forum) to provide online support maintained by other users.
• FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions maintained by the organisation.
• Auto links for inserting web links automatically within articles and news submissions.
• Simple shopping basket integration easily linked to a payment provider.
• Multiple languages for each site (user selectable).
• Bulk e-mail to registered users.
• Advanced search of all stored site data.
• User comments on articles and news.
• Categorised downloads of any type (manuals, software etc.).
• "Top Listâ€