Content Management System

A content management system, commonly abbreviated CMS, is software that lets people create, organize and publish digital content, typically web pages, without needing to write the underlying code themselves, by separating the content itself from the design and technical infrastructure that displays it. Systems for managing web content commercially emerged during the second half of the 1990s as the World Wide Web grew large enough that hand-coding every page became impractical for a growing publisher; Vignette Corporation's StoryServer, released in 1996, was among the earliest commercially successful examples aimed at large media and corporate websites. The category later broadened dramatically with open-source, general-purpose platforms such as WordPress, first released in 2003, which made content management accessible to individual bloggers and small businesses, and content management systems now underlie a large share of the websites on the internet.