The heart of a CMS is its content management database. This database acts as a repository for documents, images, and all of the other content of the website. It can manage security concerns (such as access control), revision histories, integration with outside systems, and it imposes structure onto the website. A CMS can be purchased off-the-shelf through closed-source proprietary vendors, or downloaded from an open-source community.
Business users create content for the website through the CMS’s authoring tools. These may be web-based editors, or more complex word-processer like applications. The goal (and purpose) of the authoring interface is to allow users to administer content on the website without having any knowledge of web programming or systems. Users should be able to use the authoring tool with as little technical knowledge as possible. This permits them to focus on the content that they are creating, rather than on the underlying technologies.
The CMS publishes the business users’ content to the website through its presentation interface by applying a template to the content to create a webpage. Using a template automatically gives the webpage a consistent appearance and layout. Templates are created by web-designers to be visually appealing, functional, and to address concerns of browser compatibility, accessibility, search engine optimization (SEO), and content syndication (through technologies such as RSS). Templates specify the look-and-feel of a website, such as colour schemes, common headers and footers, as well as the placement of content and navigational elements.
CMSes vary in complexity and focus from the blog-publishing platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad, to collaborative authoring tools such as wikis, to more general publishing tools such as MovableType, Drupal, and Joomla.