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Three letter word CMS is on everyone’s lips since 2003, and you know what I’m talking about if you are one of those computer/content geeks.  CMS stands for Content Management System.  What is it?  CMS is a tool that you can access through web browsers, and from there you can edit, add, delete, update, content versioning (versions), and a whole lot more.  But why?  A team of writers, small companies, and large corporations use CMS to separate content from design.  It’s easier for content writers to just worry about being creative with their contents (means come up with new contents), and the design process of making a website looks pretty has to be rested on the shoulders of web designers.  Also, the administrative process can be extremely light when using CMS correctly!

So those big boys are using CMS, but how about you?  Even if you’re one man army, CMS can still do wonder!  Let play an imaginary game.  You want to start an one man company that is concentrating in providing online news.  So how do you gonna start this?  You have way too many choices to begin with, but let assume you have couple choices in your mind, and it’s time to compare which choice is the best choice to make.  You can start this project by creating a website from scratch, coding HTML/XHTML, write out your CSS, find the right thumbnails and photos, put up some contents, upload all of these files and folders to your web server, and you have an online news website going.  Then again, what about those extra features such as Tags, RSS, Comments, Recent Posts, Feature Posts, and so on?  Going this route you have to use third party services to serve up the codes that help you add extra features to your website, and sometimes you have to code extra features yourself.  For one man company, this is way too much work right?  In addition, your whole intention is to have an online news website going, and so your main focus is all about contents.  It’s bad for you since you have to waste a whole lot of time to design your website, but you don’t have a fast start on getting contents going.  What if you don’t know how to code HTML/XHTML, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, CSS, and so on?  It’s not looking good for you then!

Another way to start an online news website is to pick out a CMS from hundreds of CMS that are available online.  Here, you still have to make a choice between commercial CMS or Open Source CMS.  Why?  Commercial CMS will cost you some money, but you will have a team that helps you customize and configures your CMS.  Open Source CMS is completely free, and you have to deal with the customization yourself.  Fortunately, if you pick the right Open Source CMS that has a huge online community, then whenever you need help with managing your CMS, you can ask the community for tips and advices.

With a CMS, you don’t have to worry about the web design process from the beginning stage as each CMS comes with a theme, and most CMSs have many more themes that you can switch to.  Though I advice you that after your website is picking up, it’s best to get a custom theme.  You still have to code some codes and create a unique website design to get a custom theme, but you can always hire someone within your CMS community to do this for you.  Hiring someone is another whole topic that I won’t go into here.  In addition to the look, CMS offers a plethora of features for you to activate, and when you activate the right features, your website can look really professional.  Each CMS has its own features, and so I cannot talk about each specific feature, but expect that CMS provides you the general features such as RSS, Tags, Comments, Add, Edit, Delete, Update, social network type of features, and so on.

CMSs’ strong point is to allow many people or just one person to manage their contents with ease.  Imagine without CMS, whenever you create a new content, you have to create a new web-page to deliver your content.  This means that you have to copy and paste the website’s HTML/XHTML codes and other necessary codes of your website’s template to a new web-page, and then adding content into that new web-page.  If you’re smart, you use CSS, but even with CSS, you still need to create the general HTML’s codes such as HEAD, TITLE, BODY, HREF, and other HTML’s elements.  With CMS, you only need to fire up your web browser, sign into your CMS portal (admin section), create new content, hit publish or save as draft button/link, and you are done.  A team of content writers love CMS as it allows writers to work on the same piece of content without worrying about constant changes of one content.  There may be a lock mechanism for each CMS that allows content versioning to happen.  Each writer will be able to find a saved version of the same content that was edited by another writer, open up that and edit away.  Within a single click, the authorized publisher can switch a web content to whatever versions he or she wants to.  Locking and versioning allow many authors/writers to edit the same web contents at the same time without the risk of ruining the data (that’s web contents).

Adding Tags to web contents within CMS is so easy that my grandma can do it too.  RSS is already enabling by default, and so you don’t even have to worry about RSS.  Each CMS has its own method that allows you to moderate contents’ comments that were written by your website visitors.

Another awesome thing about CMS is that it allows you to quickly change your web contents’ URL (web address), but not all CMS may have this feature.  Nice and easy to the eyes URLs can also be a good thing as search engine crawlers love uncomplicated URLs, too.  Though this don’t matter much anymore if you know about SEO (Search engine optimization), but nice URL is helpful to humans as website visitors may need to remember a specific web content’s URL.  This is why many CMSs allow your website visitors to search your website’s contents easily by enabling a search feature by default, if not you have to activate this feature.

Not all but many CMSs allow you to ban or block specific users from using your website.  This is an option that you can get custom to whenever your website receives a plethora of comment spams.  There is an archive feature that most CMSs carry, and this feature allows your website visitors to browse through the content history.  This means what you published years ago are still available for easy browsing through a format that is using dates as a sorting mechanism or whatever formats that each CMS carries.

There are so many features that CMSs provide, and not all CMSs provide the same features, and so I won’t bother to go into specialize features that each CMS provides.  Even if I want to, I know that I won’t be able to do so as there are hundreds of CMSs out there.  Last I heard there are thousands of CMS though!  What I can do is to list couple CMSs that I highly recommend you to take a look at.  For other CMSs, there is Google waiting to serve you.  I think you should check out Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Frog CMS, SilverStripe, Liferay, miaCMS, MoinMoin, ImpressCMS, Textpattern, Radiant, CMS Made Simple, TYPO3, Plone, MediaWiki, Jaws, BrowserCMS, and so much more.  Apparently, I had only tried few of those, but I highly recommend them as many people are creating huge buzzes about these.  This is only a small sample of wide variety of choices out there, and so you should follow your heart and intellectual decisions to pick the right CMS for your project.  The best way to figure out which CMS to use is Google for other people’s comments on specific CMSs.  Also, you can try to install the CMSs that you want to use and have a test run at it.  It’s also best that you pick the CMS that has a very active community (users), and in this way that CMS won’t be stagnant anytime soon.

In summary, no matter how you look at, starting an online website the right way is going to be a lot of work for you, but with a good CMS, it may help you handle a lot of things in the long run.  CMS is especially good when you have a team of writers that are working on the same contents.  CMS is also good for website designers as they don’t have to worry about the website contents, but all they do is to make sure that a website’s features and functionalities are working correctly.  Website designers could be splitting into two teams, one team worries about the appearance of a website, the other team worries about the programming part where coding is necessary.  Fortunately, most CMSs carry useful features and extra features that heavy coding or programming won’t be necessary, but creating a custom theme is a must — this is where website designers come in.  CMSs help you manage content easily; publish, edit, add, and delete content are a breeze.  Picking the right CMS for your project requires you to do some research as there are way too many CMSs out there.  I recommend you to use Open Source CMSs as these are free to use.  Free CMSs versus commercial CMSs, how do you know what to use?  It’s not only about the prices, but it’s also about the features, functionality, ease of use, the supports from the community or commercial team, and so on.  In my opinion Open Source CMSs and commercial CMSs are equal, because it’s up to you to see the benefits of each CMS when you draw up a project.  Have fun CMSing…