A Content Management System (CMS) is a software system used for content management. Content management systems are deployed primarily for interactive use by a potentially large number of contributors.
Web content management systems are often used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures.
A content management system may support the following features:
* Import and creation of documents and multimedia material.
* 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 workflow 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 to a repository to support access to the content. Increasingly, the repository is an inherent part of the system, and incorporates enterprise search and retrieval.
* Some content management systems allow the textual aspect of content to be separated to some extent from formatting. For example the CMS may automatically set default color, fonts, or layout. Content management systems take the following forms:
- A web content management system is software for web site management - which is often what is implicitly meant by this term * the work of a newspaper editorial staff organization
- a workflow for article publication
- a document management system
- a single source content management system - where content is stored in chunks within a relational database.
