There are four main categories of CMS, with their respective domains of use:

Enterprise content management systems

• An enterprise content management (ECM) system is concerned with content, documents, details and records related to the organizational processes of an enterprise. The purpose is to manage the organization’s unstructured information content, with all its diversity of format and location.

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A CMS 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 workflow tasks for collaborative creation, often coupled with event messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content. (For example, a content creator submits a story, which is published only after the copy editor revises it and the editor-in-chief approves it.)
• The ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content.
• The ability to capture content (e.g., scanning).
• 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.)
• Separation of presentation and content so material can be refactored for new uses. (E.g., use the same base content in different ways for desktop browsers, mobile browsers, and print output.)

Content management system Features

There are four main categories of CMS, with their respective domains of use:

Enterprise content management systems

• An enterprise content management (ECM) system is concerned with content, documents, details and records related to the organizational processes of an enterprise. The purpose is to manage the organization’s unstructured information content, with all its diversity of format and location.

Continue reading →

There are three major types of WCMS: offline processing, online processing, and hybrid systems. These terms describe the deployment pattern for the WCMS in terms of when presentation templates are applied to render Web pages from structured content.

Offline processing

• These systems pre-process all content, applying templates before publication to generate Web pages. Vignette CMS and Bricolage are examples of this type of system. Since pre-processing systems do not require a server to apply the templates at request time, they may also exist purely as design-time tools; Adobe Contribute is an example of this approach.

Online processing

• These systems apply templates on-demand. HTML may be generated when a user visits the page, or pulled from a cache. Hosted CMSs are provided by such SaaS developers as AspireCMS, Bravenet, UcoZ, Freewebs and Crownpeak.
• Some of the better known open source systems that produce pages on demand include Concrete5, Mambo, Joomla!, Drupal, TYPO3, Zikula and Plone, etc…
• DotNetNuke is a partially open source CMS that runs on asp.net and is free to download and install. DNN produces pages on demand but levels and types of caching can be set. There are also many additional "modules" that can be purchased or installed for free to extend the functionality of DNN as needed, many of which create data and content dynamically.
• Most Web application frameworks perform template processing in this way, but they do not necessarily incorporate content management features. Wikis, e.g. MediaWiki and TWiki generally follow an online model (with varying degrees of caching), but generally do not provide document workflow.

Hybrid Systems

• Some systems combine the offline and online approaches. Some systems write out executable code (e.g. JSP, ASP, PHP,ColdFusion,Perl pages) rather than just static HTML, so that the CMS itself does not need to be deployed on every Web server. Other hybrids, such as Blosxom, are capable of operating in either an online or offline mode.