"A content management system (CMS) is a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment." - Wikipedia, accessed on 19 Nov 2009 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system
The first web CMS that I encountered, SiteBuildIT, turned out to be a pyramid marketing scheme, encouraging customers to re-sell it's "newest" features, enlisting their own customers to maximise profits. Fortunately, I continued to search for my dream solution - a web CMS that would speed up the production of websites, and enable a number of interactive features that clients were asking for, such as a restricted area for private documents, or a Guest Book feature where visitors could share their opinion.
Soon I found what I was looking for, and it was called Mambo. It had just been release by a team of 'coders' (web programmers) and it was FREE and you could CHANGE the code to suit your purposes! This is a now a common phenomenon, and is referred to as Free, Libre & Open Source Software (FLOSS) and you have probably used one of the many web applications to emerge from this hot spot for technology innovation, such as Mozilla Firefox, Open Office or one of the social networking sites that harness the power of the similar technologies, such asFaceBook, YouTube, or Twitter.
When it comes to website publishing, the industry has really evolved quickly and dramatically over the last five years of which I have been actively consuming and producing websites built on a growing number of web CMS applications - WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Plone, Yola and many others.
The basic premise of a web content management system is that users can register an account and add, edit & publish content (images, text, videos, files etc) in a controlled, safe manner. This type of web publishing was previously only possible after learning some complex programming languages, however it is now simple enough to register a new account on a website built using a CMS, and copy and paste your text from a text editor like MS Word and click the Send or Save botton, and your thoughts can be shared with the world wide web.
CMS's can cater for simple brochure ware sites like www.hilltonmanor.co.za, an SMME website that handles online event registration like www.vastratech.com, a large municipality with all of it's information demands like www.johburg.gov.za or an international travel site with online reservation and payment facilities like www.proteahotels.com.
Fortunately the setup cost for such a CMS ranging from R5,000 to R500,000 so that most businesses, organisations or individuals can find a budget to…
