What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

A Content Management System [CMS] is a software platform that lets its users create, edit, archive, collaborate, report, publish, distribute and inform. Its Graphic User Interface (GUI) makes interacting with a website database user friendly.

Websites use HTML (the Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to create and design its pages. They are two of the essential core components to create Web pages. HTML provides the structure of the page, CSS the visual and aural layout.

A CMS allows users without any coding knowledge to amend, modify and edit content to websites using a WYSIWYG interface, an acronym for "what you see is what you get." The data entered into CMS software is stored in a database, which renders the web page via a template. The CSS of that page can then control the output.

In recent years, it has served up an alphabet soup of sorts, which at first blush is somewhat blurred, and confusing to decipher. However when separating the wheat from the chaff, there are some distinct differences pertaining to CMS, WSMS and ECM.