What Makes Up a Content Management System?

Content Management Systems are specialized software by design and they are designed from the ground up to be very user friendly, robust, reliable, flexible, dynamic as well as feature rich.

A Content Management System takes the responsibility of managing huge amounts of data in it and keeps it well organized, in its original form, while still provides rich outputs based on this data in printed as well as electronic form and proving very fast searching facilities to find the data that is needed at the click of a button.

Because a CMS performs so many functions, its internal build or structure is a bit special too. A CMS mostly contains of these basic parts:

A premade template system

A Database System to store data inside the CMS

A Dashboard, which is a control panel for administrator of the system.

Optional output as well as input interfaces for a variety of context savvy input output scenarios.

The template system is the most internal part of the system but this is the part that basically defines the “View” part of the whole CMS. The template system contains premade structures or framework that can define how a data entity will look, according to the specific context as well as the Organization semantics like how the data will be stored and when.

The Database system is the most important part of the system as it is the warehouse for all the data that comes through various templates into the system, well organized for final storage. This system is mostly a RDBMS like MS SQL Server or MySQL Server. These DBMSs provide robust and dynamic storage capabilities to the system along with all the goodies like integrity and security management. In some CMSs though, that are mostly based on older technologies, Flat file databases and XML storage is also used.

Dashboard is that part of the system using which the administrator of the system interacts, manages and tunes it. It contains all the controls for administrative use that give the admin direct access to the nuts and bolts of the system to fine tune and manage it perfectly. General Troubleshooting as well as data backup and restore facility is also provided in Dashboard. And lastly, if the CMS supports multiple users, the access control system is also configurable from here.

Optional Input and Output interface are generally available on CMSs that are made targeting a wide area of operations where the data formats vary by substantial margins.