About Content Management

What is a Content Management System (CMS)

Web content management systems are infrastructure that is generically built for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing web content. A web content management system may support the following features:

• Identification of all key users and their content management roles.
• The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types.
• Definition of the content work flow tasks, often coupled with event messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content.
• The ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content.
• The ability to publish the content so that it archives and is searchable.

What is Open Source?

This is an important milestone in computer coding technology. Open source software is publicly shared intellectual property whose source code is available for everyone to view, enabling other people to modify the code if necessary. One of the best known, open source software applications today is the Linux operating system. All of the source code is "open" and available for any and all developers to add to and improve, on the condition that it remains open and free - the software cannot be sold (although "packaging" of the software, with manuals, CD's, etc. is permitted). Other popular open source applications include the Firefox web browser, the Apache web server, and the MySQL database format.

Open-Source CMS

For our clients we primarily use Drupal as a CMS which allows our clients to have a free software platform. Then why are we needed? Well free doesn't mean simple. Drupal is powerful yet complex to install and configure and quite time-consuming. However, the end product provides incredible options. It's much like building a Ferrari from scratch, not everyone can do it themselves. Some of the features available are:

1. Self-editable
2. Expandable
3. RSS feeds
4. Polls
5. News feeds
6. Blogs/forums
7. Forms
8. Calendar
9. Auto-publishing to the front page
10. Affiliate advertising
11. Donations setup through 3rd-party vendors
12. Multimedia: audio, video, photos
13. eNewsletters