Content Management System Software Terms Explained

If you are new to content management system software speak, this brief glossary can serve as a helpful translator tool and offers a glimpse into the foreign language of developer jargon. Many thanks to cmswiki.com for the concise and plain explanations. We've also included a link to a larger glossary and you can read our article of frequently asked CMS questions.

Administration – the implementation and execution of all the Policy Rules and Business Rules for the organization's content. The administrator has the highest privileges-access permissions in a content management system.

Aggregation – describes the collection of assets in the first phase of a content management system. Also describes the receiving (or consuming) of RSS or RDF feeds (news feeds or data feeds) by a CMS. The producer of the feeds is called a syndicator (see Syndication).

API – Application Programming Interface – the set of calling conventions by which an application program accesses operating system and other services. An API is defined at source code level and helps ensure the portability of the code.

Authentication - establishes the identity of a site visitor.

Caching – process of saving a copy of something (a web page in the case of CMS) in a fast server closer to the requesting agency (for example in your web browser/on your hard drive) than the originating source server.

Clickstream – a record of what a user clicks on the internet or when using a software application. Logged on to a web server, this data is analyzed for web activity, market research, testing and more.

Dashboard – a popular style of interface that connects the user with many applications and their databases.

Database – used to describe an integrated assemblage of related records and files organized to be easily accessed, managed and updated.

Designer – the person who creates the look of a website. Visual design, interface design, navigation, interaction design and user experience are all sub-sets of the designer’s skill set.

Developer – the person in charge of implementation of programming code.
Granularity – describes the fineness of access distinctions.

Index – systematically arranged items, such as topics or names that serve as entry points to go directly to desired information within a larger document or set of documents. Indexes are traditionally alphabetically arranged. But they may also make use of hierarchical arrangements.

Navigation – the primary means of using content – the interactive control center of a website and of the entire web.

Open Source CMS – open source means that the source code is available for duplication and use by anyone as long as it is distributed under a license that guarantees the right to read, redistribute, modify and use freely. The advantage to open source software is that communities of developers are free to work on it and constantly evolve, adapt and improve it.

Page Views – technically this is a request to load a single page of any internet site. Each time you click on a link, you’re generating a page view at that address. These are collected, counted and analyzed for research, marketing and advertising purposes.

PayPerClick – a bid-based Internet advertising model in which advertisers only pay their host when their ad is clicked – called sponsored links and sponsored ads on a search engine results page.

Privileges – these are assigned in a CMS on a per user or role basis. These can also be assigned per page or per content element.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization.

Sitemap – can be an HTML page listing the pages of your site and help users find exactly what they’re looking for on your site, or an XML Sitemap which is another way to submit information about your site to Google.

Web Server – the main engines of the World Wide Web, these are the source of web pages returned toa browser when the server(s) receives an HTTP request from the browser. The web today is dominated by the Open Source Apache Web Server, which runs on all major platforms.

Wiki – a flat collection of web pages with no inherent structure or architecture, which builds itself when pages are edited.

For a full and detailed listing of hundreds more, visit http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=CmsGlossary.