Content Management Systems
Written by: Ilbra Abramian
Source: Shipyard
Skill Level: Novice

What's a CMS?

When I was asked to implement Anchor's shipyard website using a CMS, my intial reaction was, "What's a CMS?"

Contrary to what you may think, it does not stand for "Crazy Man Smells", it is actually is an acronym for 'Content Management System' and is a peice of software that manages and simplifies website development.

The basic features provided by a CMS include giving you the ability to create a master template. This then serves as the template for your articles which you can also write using the CMS. Pages are usually saved to a text database and a generated index is used to keep track of changes made to files.

Any organisation that regularly has people updating their website with articles will find the indexing feature very handy since it gives you some degree of control in knowing who changed what and when.

Once a series of articles have been written and checked by the editor, the CMS allows you to upload the pages so that they can be read by everyone.

Considering all this, every CMS is different in its rigidities and capability. My first task was to play around with Citydesk and work what it had to offer and whether this could simplify the task of developing Anchor's shipyard site.

• What's a CMS?
• Citydesk
• Postnuke
• Conclusion

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