A Content Management System (CMS) is a system that allows users to collaborate to create and manage content for their website. These systems can range from applications installed on your computer—which link into your website to allow you to manage it—to web-based applications, which run on your web server and allow all aspects of the website to be managed directly from the website.

Content management systems are one of the common methods for creating and managing content on the Internet and on intranets, especially in environments where there is more than one person working on the content, or where there is a lot of content involved.

These systems generally give users the ability to:

With a CMS, content and design are kept separate, which means that the design of a website can completely change and it will have no impact on the content of the website. This is quite an important feature as it means that the design need only be changed once, and not across each page of the website. This makes it easy for websites of any size to easily and quickly change their design. Also, it protects the design, as content editors do not need to integrate design into their content, which could cause problems, for instance if the content editors do not know HTML.