How Content Management Systems Work

A Content Management System is a software system that facilitates the creation, modification, organization and management of multiple types of data as a centralized system and provides controlled, secure and well defined access to it through a well designed user interface. There are some things that are important to know in order to know basically how these systems actually work.

Content Management Systems are generally written using some high level programming language, choice of which differs according to the type of system being developed and its scope of operations. For example for Enterprise CMSs, COBOL and C++ are preferred languages because of their orientation towards business systems as well as the flexibility for handling system level chores easily. Similarly for Web based CMSs, PHP is mostly the preferred language as it’s free, it’s an open source technology and it provides all the functionality that designing a CMS requires. ASP.NET is also getting quiet popular as a web programming language and there are some CMSs available today built in it.

A Content Management System’s chief objective is to manage the creation and management of data in organized way so most of the content management systems provide Template structures suitable for different types of data to be inserted in the CMS. These Templates usually define the layout as well as storage semantics of the contents. So a template can define what colors and fonts will be used in displaying that particular type of contents as well as can specify what will be stored where.

The next big concern is to provide a user interface for management of this data. This is done by providing something called a Dashboard, which functions as a centralized hub for controlling every aspect of the system as well as fine tuning various parts of it for optimum performance. This facility’s access requires an administrator password since it’s the most sensitive part of the whole system. Backup and Restore facility for data security is also available from here.

The last piece of the CMS puzzle is the storage or the database that stores all the content. Again, in Desktop based, or Enterprise CMS systems many a times flat file databases are used to save data. Languages like COBOL are very efficient in handling this kind of storage. Component CMS also use flat file system but in form of XML files mostly. Web based CMSs generally use a structured, well defined Database Management System like MS SQL server or MySQL server for storage.

Enterprise Content Management Systems

An enterprise Content Management or Enterprise CMS as it is popularly called these days is a computer application package designed to manage the publishing of digital print and other electronic content of the information of an organization.

Data and information are the key resource of an organization and to use them optimally and efficiently the organization of these two things gains a prime importance. The Enterprise Content Management facilitates development of tools and strategies to effectively collect, store, “channelize”, manage and process the information and deliver a well managed documentation related to the organizational process.

The term Enterprise Content Management was coined in around year 2000 by Association for Information and Image Management or AIIM. The term has been interpreted and defined in many ways since then but the most generic all encompassing definition was provided by AIIM in early 2008 which explicitly states that Enterprise Content Management is a set of tools and strategies used to effectively collect, manage and collaborate the documentation related to organizational process.

The ECM provides features to further develop the intelligent quotient of traditional CMS by providing the necessary infrastructure to provide verticals that can be used to provide adequate architecture for SoA Service Oriented architecture as well as EAI or Enterprise Application Integration deployments.

The interface of Enterprise Content Management has features to provide reporting as well as auditing functions.

The initial companies that sold the idea of ECM basically propagated the concept of Document Management companies. Some leading vendors of the same had been Documentum, Filenet and Opentext. All these companies were of medium size. But now the concept has gained new dimensions with many business mammoths coming in this field to provide state of art documentation management and informatics tool. Oracle, IBM and EMC are the chief vendors of ECM applications.

The ECM also has a rich repository that integrates both the date warehouse database and documentation database. Such set-up provides a smooth and streamlined flow of information across all the departments of the concern. The tool has easy and user- friendly interfaces and does not require any specific IT training to be imparted to users to get them using the application. The true success of Enterprise Content management lies in the fact that the user becomes unaware on what level of abstraction he is working, the ECM chiefly provides such interface that the user is unaware of the application structure.

Open Source CMS

Content Management Systems provide a very practical and quick solution for the daunting tasks related to creation, maintenance and management of a web site application. It provides a new and better way to do these tasks which were once considered very technical in nature and not the cup of tea of an average computer user. The philosophy behind CMS and specially Open Source CMSs is to empower these average computer users by giving them an approach to website management that is as easy as typing an article in a Word Processor.

Like every other product in the software world, CMS systems too had been commercialized by vendors to churn profits from this great idea. Some of these are even open source but you pay money for gaining support from the company in using and possibly troubleshooting it at times. But there are also CMS packages available that are both Open Source and Free. These packages include Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki, Wordpress etc. These are mostly community driven projects where everyone is free to participate in the development process.

Open Source CMS systems are usually written in some open source web programming language. The popular choices include PHP, Perl, JSP etc. By Definition, ASP.NET is also a free language under ECMA specification so some free, open source CMS are also surfacing like the AxCMS and Umbraco CMS which are written in ASP.NET. But these are not completely free as of now as currently ASP.NET only runs fully on Internet Information Services or IIS which is a paid server by Microsoft. But projects like Mono which aims at porting the complete ECMA specification of .NET on Linux and Apache server are progressing very fast.

Basically, the Open Source CMSs available today are of 3 types:

Website Management CMSs: These include CMS systems which allow you to create and manage a complete, traditional looking website. These CMS are also called General Purpose CMS sometimes. Any type of site can be created with these but they are most of the time, overly complex. Examples are Joomla and Drupal.

Blog Systems: These are specialized types of CMS that are specially suited to create personal weblog kind of sites where posts are shown one after another in chronological order. These systems are very popular these days due to their simplified, easy to use interfaces that can be used to create a website quickly that shares your views with the rest of the world. In other words, a no-nonsense solution. Example is Wordpress

Wiki Systems: These systems are a kind of documentation systems which are editable by its registered users. So these are useful when more than one person’s content is to be shown on the website. Example is MediaWiki CMS.