CMS (Content Management Systems) are an application for computers made to create, manage, edit, search and publish all kinds of information, text, images, audio files, movie files, computer files, electronic documents, web content and digiral media. A common use for CMS's is storage, controlling and to publish specific documents such as sales guides, news articles, manuals, marketing information and much more.

Tool within these content management systems are usually made so users with little or no knowledge of markup or programming languages can manage and even create content for there website with ease.

Features such as the below may be supported by most CMS:

• Content management roles for all key users
• Edit responsibilities and roles for different categories, types or users
• Workflow tasks and often event messaging creation with the option for content managers to be alerted of changes, for example, content is created by a member of staff to be submited to a story, this can be set to only get published once a copy editor has revised it and then editor chief also can be set to approve it after.
• Manage and track multiple versions of content.
• Scanning etc to captur content.
• Style seperation to automatically set font, color, size or emphasis of text etc etc.

Content Management System (CMS) also know as WCMS or Web CMS (web content manager system) is an online software, CMS's are usually used to manage and even create websites (HTML) content. A WCMS would include content creation, content editing, content management / control and many more website maintenance functions that are essential for creating and maintaning your custom designed website.

A database or database's are normaly used for the storage of metadata, content, users information and any other functions the management system might need. XML files are frequently (but no universally) created for storage, so they can give the ability of reuses and flexible presentation options.

Based on a set of template the content is displayed by a presentation layer to regular website visitors.

With most content management systems administration is done through your web browser for ease, a rich client is required by some cms systems (most are run in your web browser).

Web content management systems (WCMS) allows non-technical users with little or no programming language or markup language skills to make changes and maintaine a website with ease and no training (maybe a run through the CMS layout), unlike website builders such as Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frount Page. To build a CMS of any type it will require a experienced designer and coder to create, seup and add features to the CMS, but once this has been done website maintenance can be done with ease for even the non-technical users / administrators.