Content Management System

Content Management Systems

A Content Management System (CMS) is a system used to organize and facilitate creation and maintenance of documents and other content (in this case for a web site). They are designed to allow many people to directly contribute to the process. Contributers sign on to authenticate and their activities are both assisted and restricted by the system. To manage this, a CMS isolates the actions and effects of content creation and maintenance from other elements (layouts, styles, menus, etc.). Both Wiki's such as this and blogging sites use Content Management Systems.
A more comprehensive description and additional details can be found at Wikipedia.

Advantages of a CMS website:

content can be added and maintained without "webmaster" skills
many people can contribute or collaborate using just their web browser
limits on what contributors can and can't do can be precisely defined
site layout, style and menus are unaffected during content editing work
content is unaffected during layout, style and menu modifications
standards and changes for layout, style and menus are applied universally
site mapping, indexing, site search and menu generation is automatic
web feed (RSS) syndication of content is usually automatic
media (images, audio, video, etc) presentation and management is easier to implement
member only features are easier to implement
member participation features are easier to implement
better for sites with many frequent changes, community and media features

Disadvantages of a CMS website:

can be more work to set up for a simple site
fine tuning the look of individual pages and elements is difficult and limited
CMS systems have their own menus and logic which users must understand
one or more people must act to administrator the site and any other users
requires specific software to be present or added to the web server
your site will depend on the continuing availability and suitability of that specific software
CMS software will require occasional security maintenance and updating
usually requires some setup and configuration of a database on the web server
places greater processing demands on the web server
backup and recovery is more complicated when a database is involved
customization requires more specialized and less common skills
poor for relatively static sites with few changes and a single maintainer

Explore the CMS options at:

The website CMS Matrix allows you to compare features on approximately 100 different CMS solutions. The "Search the Matrix" feature allows you to filter the list according to the features that you need for your site.
The website Open Source CMS Systems allows you to demo 40-50 LAMP-based Portals(CMS) and review the comments left by other visitors. ("LAMP" is an acronym for 'Linux-Apache-MySql-PHP' software.)

---Listed below are details for some CMS packages that churches use to build and maintain websites.

Plone®

Cost: FREE: (GNU General Public License)

Notes: Plone is a ready-to-run content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope® application server. Plone provides a system for managing web content that is suitable for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets. Zope is a full web application environment using its own transactional object database and programmed in the full featured, object oriented, Python scripting language. The project was started in the year 1999.

Advantages: It is easy to create events, news items, new documents, photos, and other files. It uses both HTML and an easy to use Structured Text for those who are unfamiliar with website design. It has many add-on products that extend features available. It has a very flexible security/permissions structure which allows people and groups with different roles to have control over different aspects and different parts of the site. Plone can manage custom content types. Plone delivers excellent compliance with W3C web (XHTML strict and CSS) and accessibility standards (WCAGand Section 508). It can be set up to run on many different types of web servers (Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD etc.) A large developer community, and commercial support is available.

Disadvantages: Plone will generally require a specialized web host or virtual web server due to its use of Zope rather than Apache, PHP and MySQL. It is resource-hungry on the server. It requires over 75 MB RAM dedicated to your site which tends to cost from $15 to $40/month. It will require much more learning by the webmaster about how to back up the custom database, how to combine with Apache for speed and web access logs, etc. For more insights, see http://plone.org/documentation/faq/is-plone-for-me

Examples:

To try it out, create your own free site at http://www.objectis.org/ or create your own account at a Plone-based community site like http://plone.org/ For more flexible production hosting, you might look at http://interlix.com, or http://quintagroup.com

Drupal

Cost: FREE (GNU General Public License)

Notes: Similar to Plone® but implemented using more standard PHP and MySQL resources. Originally developed for 'community' participation web sites where everyone in the community is able to contribute content. Today the program is being used for a wider range of uses, including online press (The Progressive, The Onion), academic sites, media libraries, and galleries. It can be used both for sites with very limited access (just a few authors) or by a very expansive community of users and authors with different privileges. The project was started in the year 2000.

Advantages: Easy to create news items, single author and multi author documents, audio

Content Management System