A CMS or Content Management System allows a website owner to easily manage online content without having to know any back-end coding. Using a CMS can reduce the costs associated with maintaining a website and give the owner of the site complete control of what kind of content he or she wants on their site. They’re many different types of CMS systems out there such as Joomla, Drupal, and MODx and of course WordPress. These four examples are by no means a complete list. Seeing as I’m using WordPress, I’m going to dig a bit deeper into its features.

Setup/Configuration

Installing WordPress is incredibly easy and it often takes one click of a button to have it installed. Many hosting companies offer this one click installation that will have you up and running a default WordPress blog in minutes. Even if the one click installation is not available, you can simple download the appropriate files from WordPress.org and upload them manually to your server. WordPress will then guide you through a simple installation procedure creating all the necessary databases for you.

Customization

When signed into the dashboard, simply clicking on Theme under the appearance category will give you a wealth of new looks for your blog. They’re hundreds of designs available and each one can be further customized using CSS. In addition to that you can look under the plug-in section and add more customized widgets to provide additional functionality and personality to your blog/site. Customizing a theme can be a bit daunting for some, and strong knowledge in CSS is required to get the exact look you want.

Authentication

This is where the real strength in WordPress comes to play. Being a blogging platform it thrives on user interaction and input. One thing you don’t want is spammers writing offensive comments on your site. WordPress gives you full control on who can post comments or stories. The admin can even have the option to approve any comments before they become live. WordPress has broken down user roles into 5 categories and these ensure that the admin has full control of the content on the blog:

• Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
• Editor – Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
• Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts
• Subscriber – Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive newsletters, etc.

Content Control

Anyone who has ever made a post using WordPress knows how easy it really is. If you know how to using a word processor then this should be no different. It gives you all the basic functionalities of a Word Processor to quickly and easily post content to specific pages or posts. The best part is, that once content is published you can simply go back to your original page in the Dashboard and make any changes you want. Literally anyone can use this system to maintain a website. In addition, you can also add images, sounds, videos and more.

Professional/Social networking integration

With the abundance of social networking sites available, wouldn’t it be nice to have them all connected with your blog/site? Well, once again thanks to WordPress plug-ins, this is easily attainable. Any Social Networking sites you can think of will most likely have some sort of WordPress integration available. For example, there is a twitter application that will allow you to update your twitter status based on a WordPress blog post. There is another application for WordPress that will display your tweets right on your blog with links to your twitter profile. The possibilities are endless to connect with people all over the world and WordPress can bring all of them to one place.

Managing Media Assets

The media library inside WordPress makes managing media on your blog/site very easy. You can manage your videos, images, audio etc using this tool. There is no need to delete files or add files using an ftp program like leech. You can add, delete and view your media using this great tool and everything is done automatically for you. The media manage tool can also resize files for you. When you’re ready to upload the media on to a post or a page, you just access your media manager, find the file you wish to insert and click on insert into post. No html coding or any web coding required!