Content Management System - CMS - Melbourne, Australia

Content Management System (CMS)

A CMS or Content Management System is used for the control and editing of content.  Content includes electronic files, images and video based media, audio files, electronic documents and web text. The main concept behind a CMS is to make these files available for editing inter-office or over the Internet. A Content Management System is often used to archive documents as well. Many companies use CMS's to store files in non-proprietary form.  Companies using a CMS can share content with others easily, as most systems are server based.  In the case of Joomla it is a CMS based on a web server.  This makes it available to you and your customers constantly and across the whole globe - so, long as there is Internet access.  Joomla is one of the many Content Management Systems that includes a "workflow process."

A "Workflow" process is the idea of moving an document along in a process line for either approval, or for adding content. Some Content Management Systems provide control of this process through email notification and automated routing. This is ideally a collaborative creation of documents.  A CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and mulitmedia resources.

Joomla is a web content management system and is primarily used to publish content to a  specified website.

Web content management systems are often used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. A content management system is most likely able to provide the following features:-

• Import and create documents and multimedia material
• Identify the main users and their roles within the content management system
• An ability to assign certain roles and rights within the system and across differing content types and categories.
• Define management and system workflows, definitions, tasks and possibly even tied in with event messaging so that managers of the content are notified of changes to specific content.
• An ability to record, track and manage many, many versions of the same content or files - a document management system with versioning.
• An ability to publish content to an centralised content archive, to facilitate greater access to the content. More importantly with time, this repository is an vital element of the system, and incorporates search and retrieval methods.
• Some content management systems allow the text based aspect of it's content to be separated and to some extent have many different types of formatting applied to it - fonts, colours, layout styles etc.

What is a CMS Website ?

A website content management system often runs on the website's server. Most CMS provide controlled access for various ranks of users such as administrators, copy editors, senior editors, and content creators.  Access is usually via a web browser program, possibly combined with some use of FTP for uploading content. Content creators submit their documents to the system.  Copy editors comment on, accept, or reject documents.  Layout editors lay out the site. The editor in chief is then responsible for publishing the work to the live site. The content management system controls and helps manage each step of this workflow, including the technical task of publishing the documents to one or more live web servers.

The content and all other information related to the site is usually stored in a server-based relational database system. The content management system typically keeps a record of previous website editions and in-progress editions.