Web content management system

Web Content Management System (WCMS) is a software system that provides website authoring, collaboration, and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage website content with relative ease. A robust WCMS provides the foundation for collaboration, offering users the ability to manage documents and output for multiple author editing and participation.
Most systems use a Content Repository or a database to store page content, metadata, and other information assets that might be needed by the system.
A presentation layer displays the content to website visitors based on a set of templates. The templates are sometimes XSLT files.
Most systems use server side caching to improve performance. This works best when the WCMS is not changed often but visits happen regularly.
Administration is typically done through browser-based interfaces, but some systems require the use of a fat client.
A WCMS allows non-technical users to make changes to a website with little training. A WCMS typically requires a systems administrator and/or a web developer to set up and add features, but it is primarily a website maintenance tool for non-technical staff.


Types


There are three major types of WCMS: offline processing, online processing, and hybrid systems. These terms describe the deployment pattern for the WCMS in terms of when presentation templates are applied to render Web pages from structured content.


Offline processing
These systems pre-process all content, applying templates before publication to generate Web pages. Since pre-processing systems do not require a server to apply the templates at request time, they may also exist purely as design-time tools.


Online processing
These systems apply templates on-demand. HTML may be generated when a user visits the page or pulled from a web cache.
Most open source WCMSs have the capability to support add-ons, which provide extended capabilities including forums, blog, wiki, Web stores, photo galleries, contact management, etc. These are often called modules, nodes, widgets, add-ons, or extensions. Add-ons may be based on an open-source or paid license model.
Different WCMSs have significantly different feature sets and target audiences. Longtime WCMS research and evaluation firm Real Story Group (formerly CMS Watch) identifies five different tiers of WCMS vendors and open source projects.


Hybrid systems
Some systems combine the offline and online approaches. Some systems write out executable code (e.g., JSP, ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, or Perl pages) rather than just static HTML, so that the CMS itself does not need to be deployed on every Web server. Other hybrids operate in either an online or offline mode.