Content Management System

Anyone who wanted to change a website in the past had to edit the site’s files directly. That required knowledge of the languages in which web pages are written. A content management system takes this work off your hands. It’s a program that runs in the background of a website and manages content for it. You type your text into an input field in the browser, click “Publish,” and the page is online. “Content” means texts, images, videos, and files.

Why editorial teams can do without programmers

A news website often publishes dozens of articles a day. If every publication had to go through the technical department, that would be a bottleneck. A content management system therefore separates two things from one another: the content and the appearance. The editorial team only writes the text. How it is then displayed on the page has already been determined in advance.

This same separation also saves enormous effort during redesigns. If a website is to get a new design, you simply swap out the templates. The thousands of articles remain untouched, because they are stored separately in a database. A database is an organized collection of data in which you can search in a targeted way.

On top of that, there’s the division of labor. Such systems manage user roles: an author may write but not publish. An editor reviews and approves. An administrator may do everything. This allows an approval process to be mapped technically, without anyone having to keep watch.

Database, templates, and backend

At its core, a content management system consists of three parts. First, the database, in which all content is stored as data records. Second, the templates, which define the layout of the pages. Third, the user interface for the editorial team, often called the backend.

When a visitor opens a page, the following happens. The system looks up the matching article in the database. It retrieves the title, text, and images. It then inserts these building blocks into the template and sends the finished page to the browser. This happens anew with every request, usually within a fraction of a second.

The comparison with a mail-merge template fits well. The template always stays the same; only the name and address change. In the same way, every article page on a news website is structured identically, only the content differs. A new variant is called a headless CMS: there, the system only delivers the content as pure data. The presentation is then handled by a separate piece of software, such as a mobile app.

From WordPress to the shop builder

By far the most widespread system is WordPress. According to estimates, it powers around a third of all websites worldwide. TYPO3 is common among larger companies and public authorities in Germany. Online shops often rely on Shopify or Shopware, which additionally manage orders and payments. Anyone who has ever set up a blog or a club website has very likely used a content management system.

Such providers regularly appear in business news because a large market has developed around these systems. Additional features are sold as plugins, i.e., as add-on extensions. At the same time, well-known systems are a popular target for attacks. If a security vulnerability is found in a widely used plugin, hundreds of thousands of sites are affected immediately.

Currently, many providers are linking their systems with AI features. Texts are automatically summarized, images are given descriptions, translations are suggested. A common misconception, incidentally, is that a content management system is a website builder for clicking together pages. Builders like Wix are aimed at individual pages. A content management system is designed for large volumes of continuously new content.