Free Software Magazine: Introduction to Content Management Systems

"In the beginning, the web was simple. You used Mosaic to browse it. You used a text editor to construct pages on it in a language called HTML. If you weren't a techie, you probably didn't even know it existed. Then people realised that even non-techies had useful information ('content') to share. So the Content Management System (CMS) was born.

"At its heart, the web is a tool for sharing information. To make it possible to display that information (or 'content') on a variety of different machines, people devised a language (HTML) that told the machines how to display it. From the machine's perspective, this was great: it helped separate information from mere formatting. From the perspective of someone who wanted to share information, it wasn't so great: they now needed to learn HTML in order to publish their content..."

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