Content management systems (CMS) allow users to manage and present content in different ways without having to re-create it from scratch. A CMS separates content from its presentation, making it easy to change fonts, formatting, and other styling without altering the underlying content. Popular open-source CMS tools like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal give users templates and themes to customize websites and allow communities of developers to create extensions and plugins. While CMS make website creation accessible, they have less flexibility than custom coding for sites with very specific needs.

1. Overview of Content Management Systems
Large number of newbies, run away when they
hear words like HTML, PHP, MySQL, CMS.
This is needless. For driving a car, you needn’t
know internal working of clutch, break,
steering mechanism etc.
The fact is that you can straight away start
creating polished website using modern CMS
tools.
Without trapping ourselves in any kind of
jargon, let us start straightaway. What is
Content Management System AKA CMS? It is
what its spelling suggests! A system of
managing contents.
What are contents? How CMS manages
them?
Lets take an example. Suppose you have a
database of Names, Address and Date of
Births.

2. Different persons want to view this data
differently.
One person wants the first name to be shown
first, middle name second and last name in the
last. S/he also wants that the string “Name:” to
be prepended, and also, all the texts are to be
shown in Arial font with blue color.
Another person wants the same data to be
viewed differently. He wants the order “Last
Name, First Name and middle Name” Also,
s/he has particular requirement that DOB must
be in the format MM-DD-YYYY
Another example: Suppose, you have a
collection of articles you wrote about your
hobby. It contains some text, some images,
graphs etc.
You once thought to publish them with blue
font, with the word “dog” appearing in italics.
Again you yourself thought, that the blue font
is not easy to read, and wanted to change it to
plain black.

3. After a few days, you wanted to turn the word
“dog” back to normal, and instead make the
word “cat” bold.
Again, a brilliant idea of adding your
photograph at the top struck your mind.
Is it a sin to wish to see your contents
differently? Definitely not. Is it easy to recreate
the contents from the scratch, when it contains
many thousand words, hundreds of images?
Again not.
Things go worse when many users are
creating, modifying contents, commenting on
each others work, and someone wants to keep
log of who is doing what.
This is where Content Management System
fits itself. It separates content and its
presentation.
It is the same as dressing differently for
different occasions, or rearranging furniture,

4. repainting walls of your house for a change or
for some particular need.
Although the discussion so far doesn’t suggest
CMS is related to web platform, it is nowadays
synonymous to Web Based CMS.
Although it is difficult to reliably trace who
coined the word, who developed first CMS etc,
it is widely accepted that first opensource CMS
was developed at Portland Patterns repository,
in 1995. Prior to that, CMS was a million dollar
affair, only large corporations could afford. The
programmer named the system wiki wiki,
meaning fast and easy. It was the first ever
wiki, a user editable website.
It was developed in perl. After the advent of
PHP, (earlier it was a shorthand notation for
Personal Home Page, later, PHP Hypertext
Preprocesser) , many PHP based CMS
flourished like PHPNuke, PHPWiki. Other
propitiatory systems like Allair’s Coldfusion,
Microsoft Asp were also dominant.

5. Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal are the most
dominating CMSs of the date. All are PHP
based and free to use. All have rich
customization libraries of themes, extensions
etc. Some themes and extensions are free and
some are with price tag. You too can start
developing your own themes, addons and
templates etc.
All these are supported by gigantic number of
enthusiastic developers on their respective
support Forums.
There are extensions available to convert
Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal sites into one
another.
Although it is easy to dive straight into creating
website, this doesn’t mean that they are not
used for professional, state of the art websites.
Many many numbers of hit websites are
based on each of these.
Perhaps the main drowback of using
readymade CMS is that they lack flexibilty and
freedom. As they are opensource, you can

6. bend the code to suit your needs, but it is often
easy and economical to code afresh, rather
than modifying the code, if you have any
specific needs.