What is a content management system?

Many people ask about what a content management system (often abbrieviated as "CMS") is and why it is important to them. The answer to that is fairly simple; a CMS is a system (a website) that allows anyone that is authorized to go in and manage just about anything on the site for content.  In most cases, content refers to the "main" area of a site, such as the navigation menus, images, and of course.  CMSes generally provide limited access to the theme of a site -- its colors, the header logo, the width of the site, and so on, but they do often allow some functionality.  (Changing the header text, some basic colors, etc).

The real benefit to a CMS is that as the business owner, you do not need to wait for a developer or webmaster to moderate this content externally.  You can add and remove as you wish, you can allow comments on your articles and can moderate these comments, and can otherwise run everything when you want, rather than when someone else dictates. 

Whitelancer Web Development has reviewed many CMSes that exist today; some of these include Drupal, WordPress, e107, Joomla, Expression Engine, Mambo, PHPNuke, XOOPs, Radiant, Rubicks, and more.  For a list of more and to try some out, you can visit opensourcecms.com.  We have looked into a variety of these systems and we have chosen to recommend Drupal for most everything we do.  Drupal is a system that is very flexible and has a lot of different modules submitted by the community to accomplish nearly any task, from setting up an e-commerce store to a forum to a blog or even a wiki.  Furthermore, it has the best programmer interface with the most flexiblity for overriding and customizing the system of any CMS commonly used today.  That said, we have also worked with many of the others (and even written some of our own), so we understand well what is involved with establishing a good CMS that allows you as the business owner to do what you want to do.