CMS Tutorial
Content Management System (CMS) How To
The most difficult decision for any organization is the selection of a proper CMS. To select a suitable solution, the organization has to compile a detailed requirements document that reports the following things:
· What content types are needed to be managed
· How much content data has to be integrated with enterprise data
· The security requirements of the organization
· Plans to manage content from creation, publication to deletion.
· Web content management or an enterprise content management solution.
· Conducting a thorough assessment of an organization's specific business application or processes prior to installation.
By making an assessment based on the above given factors and implementing solutions that is most suitable for any organization, it can lead to increased productivity, customer satisfaction, and profitability with a content management system.
CMS users
Content management system allows users on four different levels, which are:
· Public Users: These are normal users of the site and they have all the facilities to access and navigate the content of the web site. For these types of users, the only requirement is that the content should be organized on the site in a proper and user-friendly manner and preferably personalized to the individual accessing the content. In many organizations, there is large volume of information available on the site and it is very difficult to find information, which is useful to them. By using various CMS tools, useful information can be extracted and summarized and can be presented in a proper form. The next problem is how will public users find the piece of information they need? A thousand pages of content are worthless if there is no structure or navigation. While a search engine provides a partial solution, users require consistency and extensive cross-linking. An information architect and professional indexer to construct a workable structure for your content should be used. Search engine, which are inbuilt into a CMS, allows web users to search your web documents using keywords. Using the CMS, you can control the search engine to index all of your published documents so that users can search them from web browsers.
· Members: These are the users who can choose their own workflow in the content section. The members can suggest events from a form located on the public section of the web site. Authorized staff members can also approve, modify or reject different events and can generate reports for events. The facilities like viewing or exporting attendee lists, verify payment details per attendee and printing name tags are also available for members.
· Editors/Authors: A normal CMS provide the writers with a powerful, efficient, and easy-to-use authoring environment. Authors are not required to understand HTML, or any other technical information. The CMS provides all the tools necessary to manage thousands of pages of content, published to different platforms and formats. In a decentralized authoring approach, a large number of your staff will be using the CMS. This makes ease of use particularly important. Authoring support in CMS is very strong so extra effort for setting the extra tools is not required. Content authors are able to quickly create materials using standard desktop applications, as well as image, video, and other types of media files. After materials have been developed, content providers are able to post them to the web using pre-built design templates that provide the proper formatting and corporate elements. Non-technical content authors are able to keep content up-to-date and be able to directly post content to either a staging environment or a live Web site.
· Administrators: The administrator administers the overall content and the forms section of the web site. The privileges for this role include administering roles, workflow, lifecycles, categories, and content types. Administrators manage the entire Web publishing system. Members of the Content Management System (CMS) administrator group have the widest set of permissions. CMS administrators are responsible for creating sites, adding new users, and defining user groups. The CMS administrator also has the responsibility for security settings for sites. An Administrator maintains the structure and integrity of the site, using different applications to fulfill the requirement and need of the site. The Administrator is also responsible for site administration and management, such as adding user accounts, managing site configuration settings, granting and revoking user permissions within a site, and scheduling training for site contributors. The Administrator is also the primary contact person for the other CMS users.
Using any CMS tool
A CMS tool can be used to create content from scratch, to change the content, edit or update content, to let several people edit content together, to display it in the right standard formatting or template and to let right people do the right things to it and prevent the wrong people from doing wrong things to it. The basic working of a CMS tool can be shown as below:
Using A Content Management (CMS) tool
A Content Management System (CMS) tool can be used to create content from scratch, to change the content, edit or update content, to let several people edit content together, to display it in the right standard formatting or template and to let right people do the right things to it and prevent the wrong people from doing wrong things to it. The basic working of a CMS tool can be shown as below:
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