Do You Want a Content Management System?

 Take a situation where one person, a Webmaster, coordinates a Web site, either an intranet or an external site. Content comes from users in a variety of formats, and the Webmaster turns these into usable Web pages by converting them to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). If a user has to change those pages, then the user sends the changes to the Webmaster, who changes the pages, and so on.

This presents many problems for the organization, the biggest being that all content is flowing through one person - an obvious bottleneck. That one person can do only so much work, and if that person is sick or leaves the company, a great deal of productivity is lost in finding a replacement. The publishing process can be quite frustrating as e-mails fly between the Webmaster and the user trying to get content published.

What's needed is a system that does the following:

Separates the content of a page from the presentation: If the actual content is separate from the presentation method, then the content author doesn't need to know any HTML or how the page is delivered. In fact, one piece of content could have many different templates applied to it, including formats other than HTML, such as Portable Document Format (PDF), or Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). When you want to change the look and feel of the site, you have to change only that one template rather than all the content.

Allows certain users to add and edit content: If specified users can add and edit content easily, then there's no need to send content to the Webmaster or Web team. Instead, the user who wants to create a page can do so and edit it as much as necessary.

Applies rules to whom can publish what and when: Your business rules might not want just anybody publishing content on your Web site; for example, people in marketing would be able to publish to the press release part of the site and not to the engineering section.

Can apply business rules to content: If a person from marketing creates a press release, somebody in legal might need to review that document. In this case, the document will be passed through a review process that ensures it won't go live until these reviews are done.

Can search and index information intelligently: Since the CMS can keep track of structured information about the content (such as author's name, publication date, modification dates, categories, and so on), it can produce listings of content by author, recent content, and so on. It can also provide searching capabilities that are much smarter and more useful than just a simple textual search.

Although this example portrays paybacks that are more significant for large organizations, organizations of all levels benefit from this approach. In fact, typically small organizations that don't employ a full-time Webmaster can be one of the key beneficiaries of such a system. By installing a CMS, you can resolve all these issues and more.

The key factor of any CMS is that it provides a clear separation of the key elements in it: security, workflow, templates, and so on. For example, the templates presenting an item are separate from the content. This allows you to easily modify the presentation.