What is a content management system?

A Content Management system or CMS, is a tool to use on a website that enables you to quickly and easily store and display information. On websites, this information could be blog posts like this one here, it could be products, it could be photographs, and any other bits of information you can dream up. Common open-source content management systems include Drupal (used here), Wordpress, and Joomla!. When we say "open-source" we mean that the system is freely available and the code that makes up the program is maintained and improved by a community.

The benefit to using a content management system on your website is that you can build in a lot of functionality to your site without having to build the structure yourself. The management of the data is usually done through an online database, and the presentation of the data and the manipulation of the data is done through programming code languages such as php and asp. These are just languages that enable the content management system to get data from the databases that are attached to it. The databases of open-source content management systems are MySQL.

Many times the common content management systems can be installed from the control panel of your managed hosting plan.