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What Does a Content Management System Do?

By Rob Prideaux, TechSoup

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Benefits of a CMS

A CMS offers many benefits including:

Separation of Content Data and Presentation Data

Because content in a CMS isn't inextricably tied to a particular presentation format, two powerful abilities are available:

Content portability

Since the CMS stores content as data, that data can be inserted into any appropriate output format or template. If you want your article to appear with a blue background in your Members section, but with a yellow background in your General Information section, you don't need to write your article twice. Instead, you write it once and assign it to the blue template and the yellow template.

Design flexibility

Similarly, since the CMS stores the templates separate from the content data, if you want to make a design change, however small (such as changing the font colour on a particular type of page) or sweeping (such as changing the font colour, type, and size throughout your site), you only need to change the template; the CMS handles the rest.

The whole point of the CMS is to let your authors concentrate on creating content, freeing them from the duties of ad-hoc Web design, publishing worries, having to manually re-purpose their content for other formats, and so on. A CMS can save you money and time by stripping away these extraneous tasks.

Single Storage in a Single Place

In a CMS, all the content data is stored in one place, in a consistent way, and perhaps most importantly, only once.

If you've ever suffered because you have nine different versions of an article and you can't figure out which one to use, you'll be happier with a CMS. The system maintains one copy of the content, regardless of how you plan to use it.

If, for example, you have a press release that's displayed in your Press Release section, your News Section, and your Archives section, and a mistake is discovered, the process for fixing it will be easier. Without a CMS, you would probably have to fix the mistake in three files; with a CMS, you would fix it in one file (because there's only one data file anyway), and the change appears in all three locations.

Since your content is stored consistently in one system, it's much easier to create relationships (usually hyperlinks) between content pieces and maintain them. For example, if you have several pieces that link to each other, and you move one, the CMS will make the necessary changes to keep the links working.

It is also simpler to create a new piece of content by aggregating other pieces. For example, let's say you have a collection of Internet tips, each stored as a separate piece of content, but all united by the same metadata. A CMS makes it easy to present all those pieces together by creating a template that shows all content that had the metadata, in this case, "type: tip" and "subject: Internet". It's also much easier to survey what you have.

Finally, should you decide to take all your content and migrate it to some new format, the process should be much easier.

All of this means more time and money saved: you don't duplicate work, you don't lose content, and you spend less time managing content.

Workflow Management

Any good CMS will have some sort of workflow management scheme. This usually involves defining certain roles - such as author, editor, and publisher - and giving each of those roles some abilities and responsibilities. Likewise, content can exist in a number of states, such as draft, final, published, or archive, and each state has certain characteristics.

Combine the roles and the states, wrap some logic around it, and you have a workflow system. The author is assigned to create the draft, the editor is notified that the draft is ready to be edited, etc.

Workflow management facilitates better communication, progress tracking, and more efficient content transitions. Even a basic system will notify the appropriate role that a piece of content has reached a state where it needs attention. More advanced systems allow all sorts of triggers and controls to be put into place. None of these features are going to do the work of managing your processes; rather, they give you better visibility into the process and better tools to do the work.

The major gain here is control, which saves time and money by speeding communication and preventing mistakes. The workflow system handles much of the communication, tracking, and measuring so your authors, editors, and publishers can concentrate on writing, reviewing, and publishing, instead of walking around checking on things, looking for lost drafts, and trying to figure out where all the time has gone.

Automated Publishing

When it comes to freeing technical resources from publishing tasks, almost any CMS shines. The CMS allows non-technical people to schedule, trigger, and otherwise manage the process of moving the content to the production environment.

If your valuable technical people are constantly distracted by pushing out small text changes, regularly releasing new articles, or fixing layout issues, the CMS will change their worlds. With a CMS in place, these tasks become things that publishers and editors can do, usually with a powerful set of tools available within the CMS. The technical people maintain the CMS, but it's at much higher level, and their time is greatly freed to handle more technical issues throughout your organisation.

Usually, the actual time required to publish your content is reduced. More importantly, the time it does take is spent by the most appropriate people (authors, editors, publishers), and not by people who are probably supposed to be working on a new Web site feature or tuning up the network.

Hopefully, you have a more specific idea of what a CMS does, and how a CMS might save your organisation time, effort, and therefore money. On top of that, a CMS will enable you to better manage your content, therefore making it more usable for you and your constituency.

Nonprofit-Focused Content Management Systems

Within the nonprofit world, there are a number of CMS solutions available that were developed with nonprofits in mind. Many of these have the same abilities as commercial CMS products, but they offer specific features for nonprofits, such as:

• Membership Management
• Online Donation Facilitation
• E-mail Outreach
• Event Management
• Online Advocacy

Many of these products aim to be a one-stop Web site management suite for nonprofits, and many of them work quite well in this respect.

If you've looked at your organisation and its needs, and you believe that you would benefit from these additional features, consider one of these products. But try to ensure that your basic content management needs are met first.

Nonprofit-Specific Resources

If you're interested in getting a Content Management System that's been built to support common nonprofit needs, or you prefer to keep your funds in the nonprofit sector, you might be interested in one of these products:

• Get Active Content Management
• Avenet NonprofitOffice
• Real Impact Content Management (now LUX Media 501 )
• NetCorps Web Management System
• CitySoft Community Enterprise
• CTSG SiteTron CMS 

For UK-based providers try our Suppliers Directory or IT for Charities.

General CMS Resources

CMS Watch: CMS Watch is an independent source of information, analysis, and reports about Web content management solutions. CMS Watch puts out a comprehensive, if expensive, report on the commercial CMS industry each year.

Step Two Design's Content Management System Requirements Toolkit: This toolkit contains a complete set of typical requirements for a CMS project. Like the CMS Watch report, it's expensive, but if you're after a large or complex CMS, this toolkit will save you a lot of work and help ensure that your requirements are complete.

CMS Bible, Publisher: Wiley; ISBN: 076454862X : This large tome from industry guru Bob Boiko is thorough. If you want to understand CMS from the ground up, including strategies for gathering requirements, making purchase decisions, or building your own CMS, get this book.