What is a Content Management System?

Software that manages documents for Web sites. It provides for the storage, maintenance and retrieval of HTML and XML documents and all related elements. Content management systems may be built on top of a native XML database and typically provide publishing capabilities to export content not only to the Web site, but to CD-ROM and print. That's the official explanation.

In layman's terms - imagine taking a magazine and creating a list of all the text in it, and another list with all the pictures/photographs in it. That would represent the raw data of the magazine and it could be described in basic terms as its 'content'.

What is missing from this list is how this raw data is presented - e.g. The photograph of Big Ben, should appear on Page 6, above the House of Commons article. It should be justified to the right with a descriptive passage to the left. HTML is used across the Internet to describe how content is laid-out or presented.

A content management system uses a database to store all the text and pictures (and files) . It also stores all the detail about how the information should be presented (HTML and XML) and combines the two when someone clicks on a link to a page. These pages are created 'dynamically' when they are requested and that's why they are sometimes referred to as 'Dynamic' websites.