Types of CMS
Content management systems can be divided into many different kinds, for several different purposes. Firstly, there are website CMS and non-website CMS. The former are designed to serve content on the Internet, the latter to contain and organise an enterprise’s information in a private environment.
The next division is between the various classes of function, for example:
- The micro CMS class
- The lightweight class
- The online brochure type
- The extended online brochure type, with rich media publishing
- The community / news model
- The provider-consumer model
- The enterprise class of CMS
- The ecommerce-enabled type
The vast majority of CMS is in the online brochure class, or at least operates in that class by default even if other roles are available. ‘Brochure’ class means that the website is an online equivalent of a printed brochure – its job is to present the business optimally, and display the products and services on offer.
The most basic division is probably between the community / news model, and the provider-consumer model. These model types refer to whether a CMS is best suited to many people providing content, or one person or a small team doing so. The community model can be further subdivided into two sections: those suitable for one group or those suitable for multi-group use.
And so on, for other classes of CMS (see elsewhere on the site). In fact most CMS can perform several functions, although there is one feature that must be available in order for the CMS to work as a community type: frontend content editing and upload. Here, people can login via the frontend, and either input material or edit it online.
Often a CMS will function well in two or more classes, perhaps depending on what extensions are provided. It is possible to produce two or more versions from one basic CMS core, each being particularly suitable for one type of function.
A community / portal type CMS will function satisfactorily as a provider-consumer type with no modifications. This refers to access control levels, or if you like, user rights – group or individual privileges such as editing, publishing and so on. This feature set is the most complex to provide, and to get right. An enterprise-level CMS must have a core feature set of elevated capability, including versioning, workflows, and audit trails. There should be portal (intranet), VPN / WAN (extranet) and load-balancing capability. It is therefore the most complex.