What is a CMS?

At the heart of it, a CMS allows us to create and manage content on websites. It can be done either by one person or a team of people. Sometimes, some of the control of content creation and management can even be given to the website's visitors.

Let's take an example we've seen before: CNN.com. This news publication website features constantly updating content multiple times a day, every day. These hundreds and thousands of pages would be too cumbersome to build from scratch daily.

This is where a CMS steps in. With a CMS, the content publishers of CNN can simply focus on writing the content itself; the CMS is then used to publish the right content to the right categories at the right time. And because the format of each of the pages has already been defined, the CMS just replicates those as new pages, greatly simplifying the process.

But you don't need to have thousands of pages of constantly updated content to want to use a CMS.

Imagine...