A Content-Management System (CMS) is content management system (CMS) software, usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A CMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions.
Usually the software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease.
Most systems use a database to store content, metadata, and/or artifacts that might be needed by the system. Content is frequently, but not universally, stored as XML, to facilitate reuse and enable flexible presentation options.
A presentation layer displays the content to regular Web-site visitors based on a set of templates. The templates are sometimes XSLT files.
Most systems also use some form of server side caching which enables a boost of performance. This works best when the CMS is not intended to be changed often but visits happen on a regular basis.
Administration is typically done through browser-based interfaces, but some systems require the use of a fat client.