What exactly CMS (content management system) is?

[SylviaW]

I'm a novice and trying to learn what exactly CMS (content management system) is.
I went to different info from web incl. Wikipedia etc.

I understand there is various CMS software - from very costly to free, providing authoring (and other) tools to manage a website using a standard browser without coding done by hand .

What I can not understand is this:

Do the website design programs has built-in CMS ability and if yes, which ones?

Which free reliable CMS programs I can get from internet and how to use them?

On my computer I have Windows XP Pro.

Thanks for any practical and simple to understand advise!
Sylvie

 

[jonweb2009]

cms is a webapplication which assists you in managing the content what you add. It also helps you to create the content and manage it. It keeps an index of all the contents so that it is easily categorised.

The content is the individual webpage what you create. So bunch of web pages makes the website and thus the CMS helps you to create a website and manage it.

free cms are

JOOMLA, DOTNETNUKE, DRUPAL...

FOR JOOMLA AND DRUPAL YOU NEED PHP, DOTNETNUKE REQUIRES .NET FRAMEWORK 2

 

[benivolent]

Basically content management system is used to manage the website content. It consist of two types namely content management application and content delivery application.

 

[scept1c]

"Do the website design programs has built-in CMS ability and if yes, which ones?"
as far as I understood, CMS is a already completed working system. Joomla requires php scripting language.
if you're a novice, you can use different templates and it's not obligatory to code by yourself.

 

[olegshat]

Usually term CMS used for on-line website builder. But one can manage a website using off-line website design programs and often it is much easy and comfortable. For example, take a look to Sitecraft demo (www.sitecraft.ws) or see video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFKxC1SCcK8

You can make your site on your computer and you are independent of server software. You also absolutely free from knowing HTML or other technical issues. For novice there is a special version: Sitecraft-Newbie.

 

[5minutejoomla]

Do the website design programs has built-in CMS ability and if yes, which ones?

website design programs main purpose is to create files, usually HTML and sometimes CSS, that can be read and interpreted by web browsers as web pages. All of the information necessary to see the webpage is included, the web design program can build and display a reasonable approximation of what you will see in a browser.
A CMS is different. It has 2 parts - data inside a database (usually mySQL) and files that get the information out of the database and then displays it in a usable format. You can use a web design program to build or change the files that call to the database, but you can't see the how the final page will look because it requires the data in the database.
(OK, I know you can run files locally and possibly bypass this issue, but for the sake of explaining how this works, this is how it works unless you do a lot of complicated stuff)

Which free reliable CMS programs I can get from internet and how to use them?

Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal are all free CMS. Free to download, but all of them take a certain amount of work to learn well enough to build a website. If I were you, unless you had a good reason to do otherwise, I would start with Wordpress. It's the easiest to setup and use by a wide margin. Joomla is next in complexity and Drupal is the toughest. This is also the same order in terms of the complexity of the kind of sites you can build with them.