We have three main types of Content Management systems (CMS), Online processing, Offline processing and Hybird systems.

Online Processing
This type of content manager applys templates on demand (live as you create or edit etc). When a user visits the page HTML is generated, or pulled from the cache. Some well known open source content systems the produce on demand pages are Joomle, Mambo, TYPO3, Drupal, Zikula and Plone. Templates performed this way are come from most web application frameworks, but they may not incorporate content management themselfs. Site such as Wikis follow the online modle with caching but dont generally provide document workflow.

Offline Processing
This type of content management system per-process all content you do, before publication the templates applied. These cms types may also exist purly as design tools due to not needing a server to apply the template at request time since they pre-process content.

Hybird Systems
This type of content management systems use both the online and offline approach. Some of these cms systems use an executable code like PHP, ASP, JSP or Perl pages instead of just the static HTML, this is so the CMS does not have to deploy the work on every web server. There are some other cms's that can work in an online and offline mode.