Basic Content Management System (CMS)
Creating or purchasing a basic content management system can be extremely empowering for an organization. It allows non-technical staff to add, edit, and delete content on the intranet in a quick, efficient manner after minimal training. They do this from a graphical web interface to a database where they can read and write information. This information in the database is then dynamically presented to site users.
A basic CMS would typically allow an organization to manage text and images for multiple content areas, including news; press releases; organizational information; and other business data. It would also allow for the definition and implementation of a workflow for developing, validating and publishing content.
Some excellent CMS systems of commercial quality are available as open source freeware.
There are many ways to approach the creation of a CMS and they are discussed later on in Chapter 8.