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Content Management Systems (CMS)

Content Management Systems (CMS) are becoming increasingly popular for managing today's large and complex web sites. The actual content of the website is held in a database, MySql is a very popular relational database choice as it is free and is often supplied as part of a web hosting package. The content is retrieved from the database and packaged into web pages by a software system running on the web server. The format of the pages can be highly customized by using templates and style sheets (CSS). From the user viewpoint the site looks like normal web pages.

Content Management Systems let website owners concentrate on the information in the site without worrying about detail such as creating pages in the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Many large websites, particularly anything interactive such as news sites, blogs and forums are driven by CMS. Complex sites that have specific requirements will write their own software but many off-the-shelf packages, both free and commercial, are available. These are often written in the PHP or Perl programming languages. As with MySQL these two computer languages are free and frequently come as an integral part of web hosting packages. Search engines can spider Perl, PHP, ASP.Net, Coldfusion, Python and Java amongst other languages providing the pages are reachable. Moveable Type and pMachine are examples of the most popular Content Management Systems.

Just as the standard look and feel of a CMS will not suit most websites they are also poorly optimized for search engines straight out of the box. The focus of CMS designers is information delivery to human users not search engine robots. There are a number of customizations that make Content Management Systems more search engine friendly.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

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