What Does a Content Management System Do?

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1: " Knowing When You Need CMS ")

This is the second in a three-part series on content management systems (CMS). In this article, TechSoup will outline the basic abilities of content management systems to help you understand what a CMS can do.

A CMS is a set of processes, applications, and databases that help an organization create, store, coordinate, and publish information in a useful format, a timely fashion, and with a consistent method. "Content" refers to any meaningful information (data) formatted for consumption by an audience.

In the first article, " Knowing When You Need CMS ," TechSoup looked at some types of CMS ( WCMS, ECMS, etc.), as well as some styles (Commercial, Open Source, etc). We'll now go deeper into the basic functions of a CMS.

First, it's important to understand some concepts presented in this article.

Metadata:

Metadata is "defining" data that provides information about content data managed within the CMS. In other words, metadata assigned to a piece of content describes what the content is, what it relates to, and how it's associated with other pieces of content. Metadata is commonly described as "information about information."

For Web sites, content usually has categories, keywords, authors, publishing dates, and template assignments that control how the content is displayed and used. This metadata is then used for a variety of purposes, including searching and indexing.

Template:

A CMS uses templates to control the display of your content -- that is, the way your content will look on a page. The templates are created by your Web designers and are managed separately from the content. At publication time, the CMS puts the content into the template for final presentation. Templates are like blank versions of your page types; until the CMS puts, for example, the specific "Subject" content into the "Subject" space, there's nothing there. When multiple pages on your site follow the same formatting, you can use one template for all the pages that will look the same, even when the actual content is different.

Separation of content and presentation:

When you create content, the CMS isolates the content data from the content formatting and the content metadata. On a Web site, data usually consists of the text and the images that will appear on your site. The formatting is determined by the template assigned to that content, and the metadata is defined above. The CMS stores these components separately and maintains the relationship between them. This concept is important, because it makes your content data portable. Since your content is not attached to the format for which it was originally written, you're free to use it in other ways.

How a CMS Works

At the center of any CMS is some sort of repository, or content database, where the content is stored. Content contributors get content into the repository via the authoring interface, and they categorize and organize it using the metadata management tools. When the content is ready, the CMS helps to get the content back out for publishing. The end of the publishing process is the beginning of the presentation process, at which point your audience can view your content. All of this is managed by the CMS workflow system.

Simple, right? It gets more complicated as more features are added. The basic feature of a CMS include:

Content Authoring:

This allows your content contributors to create content and store it in the repository. There are many tools and styles.

Workflow Management:

This allows you to monitor, adjust, and maintain the process through which the creation and publishing tasks are done in your organization. Systems range from highly complex to quite simple, but all give you a set of tools to manage the activities of authors and the progress of content.

Content Storage:

This feature keeps the content sensibly organized and accessible. Most CMS use a relational database; the point is to store the content in one place and in a consistent fashion.

Publication Management:

This allows you to organize your content with metadata and formatting. CMS have different ways of approaching this, but the better ones allow you to define and manage your metadata and your templates.

Publishing:

Publishing allows you to merge the content data and the content formatting and move it from the repository to your publication. Different methods exist, but they all allow you to push the content out to some publicly accessible place without the help of your tech team.

Within these features, there can be hundreds of smaller features that help accomplish the tasks of creating content publications. It's important to get the system that meets your basic needs the best, then consider these other features (which we'll discuss in the third article in the series).

Benefits of a CMS

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 color on a particular type of page) or sweeping (such as changing the font color, 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 ad-hoc Web design, publishing worries, having to manually repurpose 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.

Because 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's 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 organization.

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 organization 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 organization 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.

Read Part 1 of the CMS series: "Knowing When You Need CMS ."