WOW, AWESOME question, and right up my alley. I sell these systems for a living. It is an admin portal where you can easily manage the content of your Web site, and even many of your business functions as well. There are many, and there is NO BEST one for everybody, but here's a few tidbits. 1) Get a few demos to test them. 2) Ask them how technical you need to be to use their system. 3) Set your budget.
If you are looking at these for a company, set the budget first. You can pay $10,000, or more, for the best of the best for these systems. Also, some come with marketing systems, and other tools. These are necessary but might not be in your budget.
A very basic system for cheap is the firms that offer A Web address, a basic site (With Management Features) like the sites that come with a Register.com Web address. BSavvy is a mid-level one and HotBanana is a higher level one!
A content management system is a computer software system for organising and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content. A content management system is often a web application used for creating and managing websites and web content. Alternatively, content management systems (CMS) can also be used for storing and publishing documentation such as operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, etc. There are many open-source and proprietary CMS solutions available, which is in fact true for most systems of any kind. The market for content management systems is quite fragmented.
Withoug going much into technilaties, i can explain you the same in simple and life saving words.
CMS i.e. Content Management System is actually an admin area for your website where the content of every dynamic page of your website is linked with this admin area. Admin has a simple interface like writing an email where he can modify/ edit the content of the website as simply as we do edit a word document in MS Word and save it. As soon as he saved the updated text in admin area, this change starts reflecting on the LIVE website.
Although you can pay thousands of pounds for a CMS as suggested above, many of the really good ones are open source - ie free. These include Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, and Typo3. These projects are professional-quality, maintained by hundreds of volunteers and you'll find tons of support in online forums.
There's a great site at http://www.opensourcecms.com/ which maintains installations of all of the top CMSs so you can actually log in and try them out yourself. It's definitely worth a look. Another site is http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ which allows you to compare the features of each CMS.
Content management, or CM, is a set of processes and technologies that support the evolutionary life cycle of digital information. This digital information is often referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content. Digital content may take the form of text, such as documents, multimedia files, such as audio or video files, or any other file type which follows a content lifecycle which requires management.
The digital content life cycle consists of six primary phases: create, update, publish, translate, archive and retire. For example, an instance of digital content is created by one or more authors. Over time that content may be edited. One or more individuals may provide some editorial oversight thereby approving the content for publication. Publishing may take many forms. Publishing may be the act of pushing content out to others, or simply granting digital access rights to certain content to a particular person or group of persons. Later that content may be superseded by another form of content and thus retired or removed from use.
Content management is an inherently collaborative process. It often consists of the following basic roles and responsibilities:
Content author - responsible for creating and editing content.
Editor - responsible for tuning the content message and the style of delivery, including translation and localization.
Publisher - responsible for releasing the content for use.
Administrator - responsible for managing access permissions to folders and files, usually accomplished by assigning access rights to user groups or roles. Admins may also assist and support users in various ways.
Consumer, viewer or guest- the person who reads or otherwise takes in content after it is published or shared.
A critical aspect of content management is the ability to manage versions of content as it evolves (see also version control). Authors and editors often need to restore older versions of edited products due to a process failure or an undesirable series of edits.
Another equally important aspect of content management involves the creation, maintenance, and application of review standards. Each member of the content creation and review process has a unique role and set of responsibilities in the development and/or publication of the content. Each review team member requires clear and concise review standards which must be maintained on an ongoing basis to ensure the long-term consistency and health of the knowledge base.
A content management system is a set of automated processes that may support the following features:
Import and creation of documents and multimedia material
Identification of all key users and their roles
The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different instances of content categories or types.
Definition of workflow tasks often coupled with 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.
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
Comments
WOW, AWESOME question, and right up my alley. I sell these systems for a living. It is an admin portal where you can easily manage the content of your Web site, and even many of your business functions as well. There are many, and there is NO BEST one for everybody, but here's a few tidbits. 1) Get a few demos to test them. 2) Ask them how technical you need to be to use their system. 3) Set your budget.
If you are looking at these for a company, set the budget first. You can pay $10,000, or more, for the best of the best for these systems. Also, some come with marketing systems, and other tools. These are necessary but might not be in your budget.
A very basic system for cheap is the firms that offer A Web address, a basic site (With Management Features) like the sites that come with a Register.com Web address. BSavvy is a mid-level one and HotBanana is a higher level one!
GOOD LUCK!
A content management system is a computer software system for organising and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content. A content management system is often a web application used for creating and managing websites and web content. Alternatively, content management systems (CMS) can also be used for storing and publishing documentation such as operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, etc. There are many open-source and proprietary CMS solutions available, which is in fact true for most systems of any kind. The market for content management systems is quite fragmented.
Withoug going much into technilaties, i can explain you the same in simple and life saving words.
CMS i.e. Content Management System is actually an admin area for your website where the content of every dynamic page of your website is linked with this admin area. Admin has a simple interface like writing an email where he can modify/ edit the content of the website as simply as we do edit a word document in MS Word and save it. As soon as he saved the updated text in admin area, this change starts reflecting on the LIVE website.
Got it??
--
Thanks,
Rahul Kaul
Web Design @ http://www.creatorshive.com/
Although you can pay thousands of pounds for a CMS as suggested above, many of the really good ones are open source - ie free. These include Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, and Typo3. These projects are professional-quality, maintained by hundreds of volunteers and you'll find tons of support in online forums.
There's a great site at http://www.opensourcecms.com/ which maintains installations of all of the top CMSs so you can actually log in and try them out yourself. It's definitely worth a look. Another site is http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ which allows you to compare the features of each CMS.
Content management, or CM, is a set of processes and technologies that support the evolutionary life cycle of digital information. This digital information is often referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content. Digital content may take the form of text, such as documents, multimedia files, such as audio or video files, or any other file type which follows a content lifecycle which requires management.
The digital content life cycle consists of six primary phases: create, update, publish, translate, archive and retire. For example, an instance of digital content is created by one or more authors. Over time that content may be edited. One or more individuals may provide some editorial oversight thereby approving the content for publication. Publishing may take many forms. Publishing may be the act of pushing content out to others, or simply granting digital access rights to certain content to a particular person or group of persons. Later that content may be superseded by another form of content and thus retired or removed from use.
Content management is an inherently collaborative process. It often consists of the following basic roles and responsibilities:
Content author - responsible for creating and editing content.
Editor - responsible for tuning the content message and the style of delivery, including translation and localization.
Publisher - responsible for releasing the content for use.
Administrator - responsible for managing access permissions to folders and files, usually accomplished by assigning access rights to user groups or roles. Admins may also assist and support users in various ways.
Consumer, viewer or guest- the person who reads or otherwise takes in content after it is published or shared.
A critical aspect of content management is the ability to manage versions of content as it evolves (see also version control). Authors and editors often need to restore older versions of edited products due to a process failure or an undesirable series of edits.
Another equally important aspect of content management involves the creation, maintenance, and application of review standards. Each member of the content creation and review process has a unique role and set of responsibilities in the development and/or publication of the content. Each review team member requires clear and concise review standards which must be maintained on an ongoing basis to ensure the long-term consistency and health of the knowledge base.
A content management system is a set of automated processes that may support the following features:
Import and creation of documents and multimedia material
Identification of all key users and their roles
The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different instances of content categories or types.
Definition of workflow tasks often coupled with 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.
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
Joomla. It's the best around.
http://www.joomla.org/
Best of all it's free.
Michael
http://www.webmasterautomation.com/forums/
phpnuke is great as well and free.
http://phpnuke.org/