How Do Web Content Management Systems Work?

Content Management Systems have great utility for any kind of task that requires management of data in an organized way thereby providing clean, non redundant storage, highly efficient retrieval and secure, hassle free housekeeping of data. Content Management Systems have grown up in many different forms today, like Enterprise CMSs, Component CMs, but the form of CMS that is immensely popular today between both corporations and regular people today are Web Based CMSs. Internet is getting closer to reach of common man day by day and the ease of creating and managing web content that a CMS provides have found it many users in very less time.

A Web based Content Management system basically works by providing a well defined, easy to use, abstract interface to the user for creating and managing content online for different types of online applications, be it regular websites, blogs, wikis and what not. The user doesn’t have to be aware of the technological gimmicks that are working behind the system and can just publish contents just being like a publisher using content publishing software.

Web CMS are written and designed in High Level programming languages including PHP, ASP and not ASP.NET. Of these PHP is the hot favorite as it is free and is in market long before ASP.NET. The system is very modular in nature and consists of tightly coupled independent parts working together.

At the core of the system, there is a storage subsystem, generally handled by a Relational Database Management System like MySQL, MS SQL Server etc. This subsystem is responsible for storing all the data and maintaining its integrity. Data is stored in form of 2 dimensional tables also called relations.

On the top of it is a basic framework that handles the low level, plumbing details of the system and serves as a base for the other module. This layer usually provides a set of APIs to perform core tasks. On the top of it there are other modules working which includes a Template System which handles the "View" aspect of the system and provides standardized way to the user to create and edit contents. Another part of the system called Dashboard combines with the framework layer and Template system to provide user with the interface to interact with the system as well as to manage and optimize it.

User creates and edits the contents using dashboard which in turn manages it using templates and all of this goes through the framework layer to be finally stored in the database. In this way, content is created, stored and managed in an organized way.