The Internet has really evolved over the years. From plain boring HTML pages now we have dynamic beautiful web pages, web apps that allows user to interact on daily basis. One of the important outcome of the Internet has to be CMS ( Content Management System), which allows user produce and manage the content and information of a website. We are going to explain briefly what a CMS is and look into its development over the years.

What is CMS ?

A content management system is a computer software or a collection of tools which is used to manage information. Known as CMS in short, it can be programmed in a computer language and after that can run on well on a computer system. With the help of a good CMS, one can input data, store it in the database. At times, it can be edited by some authorized users and finally made available to the public.

A professionally crafted content management system can handle formatting, cataloging, storing and retrieving the data. In the process, there is no need for the users to have extensive knowledge of technical expertise. CMS, nowadays are used by libraries, newspapers, online stores, academic journals and others.
We have put together a small timeline of CMS. There are lot of open source (freely available and may be redistributed with or without modification )of CMS’s and we could not list them all. Therefore, we have listed them based on populating and importance.

Open Source CMS Timeline

If you look at content management systems over the years you can easily see that there has been a major changes. At the initial stages, documents were manually converted to HTML. Then a number of complex programs were used to make content and Photoshop to edit the images. RTF to HTML was generally used to convert word documents to HTML language. Dreamweaver was used in many cases in order to edit the HTML pages. Any corrections need to be made in the HTML document manually and then the new document needs to be uploaded. All the links that need to be updated had to be searched for and then they had to be changed one by one manually.

But with time, it was found that the web content was becoming very fast and people were willing to write their own content and publish their own written stories and photographs. New programming language PHP into being, and it changed the way content management system should be managed. It was around the late 1990’s and by that time, many big newspapers and magazines started using the new CMS platform. That particular time can be referred as the dawn of modern content management system. At that time, work on open source CMS started and some of them are Mambo, Drupal, etc. Though CMS was being done in three major platforms like Custom, Proprietary and Open-source, over the years, it has been seen that websites built on Open Source CMS are working properly.

Another important factor that pushed the CMS development was Content strategy, a way of content planning, creation, publication, and governance. Once upon a time, the IT department or someone who knew HTML used to run the CMS. The choice of CMS at that time was based on price, features and cultural fit but not on content strategy. With the changing world, web has become the primary communication, marketing and sales vehicle of any organization. Therefore, a system was need where users can plan, develop and come up with their content. A content management system allowed multiple user to collaborate and contribute content without requiring knowledge of the how back  end works. The target audience of the web often has become the editorial infrastructure, which is purely internal. Nowadays, many companies create their own CMS based on needs with different functions and options.

Top 5 Open Source Content Management system

Here is 5 widely used and know Content Management system not in any particular order.

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Text Pattern
• Movable Type

Follow this link if you want to get into more detail.

Most of the information used in this article is based on Wikipedia, Google search and the application’s website. If there is error in the information, please feel free to add it in the comment so we can update it.

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