With the increasing need for efficient management of knowledge in organizations a number of components to manage documents and information have been created.
Content management system (CMS) offer an integration of these components in one compact system. Generally, such systems offer the possibility to create, edit, and manage corporate and product-related contents (text or multimedia).
There are client and server systems available for the user. Server-CMS are normally controlled with programs on the server. It depends on the computational capacity of the server and does not scale well with the number of users. On the other hand they allow easy maintenance of websites worldwide via the Internet. In contrast, the client CMS is directly controlled by the computer of the user. A further classification can be made by differing the CMS results. Is the generated Data static or dynamic?
CMS should allow many users simultaneously to modify documents controlled by a defined query workflow. These users are assigned roles to that define the necessary rights to access data and documents.
A publishing process involves if necessary all relevant persons starting with the author, to the editor, and to the publisher. With templates it is possible to guarantee a clear, uniform, and even more rapid production of documents. Media-neutral data management makes it possible to generate content on demand for the user. More and more frequently XML is used for data storage. It is a very flexible format for data managing.
Content can be restricted in it's temporal retrieval, reducing the needed time for data maintenance. Users are automatically notified if document are changed and with version management the document history can also be managed. Import and Export interfaces allow communication with the outside world, several other programs, external information services, and other integreated data sources. An essential feature of modern CMS is the modular expandability which makes it easy accessible for users as well as programmers who want to integrate new content or to change the existing contents.
Content management systems can be further differentiated by focussing on the application. There are editing systems, Web content management systems, and enterprise content management systems. While editing systems are mainly used in the media sector, web content management systems are widely used with Online Shops in the World-Wide-Web. This is supported primarily with Internet content formats such as HTML, XML and others.
Enterprise Content Management systems provide a uniform interface for all data applications across multiple levels. The use of redundant services can be avoided and so they provide a clear, easily maintainable system.
The following content management systems are very popular: Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal and TYPO3.
Certain agencies have become specialized in specific systems. Thus, a Typo3 agency is specialized in implementing complex web pages with this Open Source CMS.