Content Management Systems (or CMS’s) are becoming much more widely used amongst web designers, but do you know what they are?

A CMS does exactly what it says on the tin - it is a system by which the content of a website can be managed. Not exactly rocket science really!

These systems were originally developed for sites which had large numbers of contributors, to enable content to be quickly updated or added.

CMS systems are particularly beneficial where the user who will be updating the content has little or no knowledge of HTML, as publishing tools similar to those found in popular office packages can be integrated into the CMS, allowing the user to format their content using “point and click” rather than entering the HTML code.

Initially these systems were custom designed by programmers and expert web developers for each client, which really limited their use to corporations with large budgets.

During 2002, one of the first major open source CMS’s was released by Mambo which heralded a new era in web design and vastly expanded the accesibility of these systems to regular web designers.

Releasing Mambo as “Open Source” meant that the source code (the inner workings) of the system were open to anyone who cared to look, which in turn meant that amongst many other benefits, any problems could be fixed by users and developers, effectively speeding up development and resolving problems very quickly and efficiently. This also meant that there was huge scope for developing “extensions” for the base system - other “add-ons” which enhanced the basic functions of the CMS.

In 2005, a fork from Mambo arose due to political differences within the team, which was called Joomla.

Although many other systems have been designed, Mambo and Joomla remain the most popular CMS due to their ease of use and vast potential for customisation and scalability.