What's Content could refer to ?

It could be an article, a news, users data, client informations, products, reviews, courses, comments, sources, images, flash, video ... An infinite list !

How do we need to manage these Contents ?

Since its called "Content Management" so there is something related to management ? We need to create data, update it and delete it, we need also to access easily any informations based on search or any criteria. Some distributed infrastructure require to access data from other applications, so the same needs should be available as webservices too. In management also, there is the permissions management or levels of availability of content.

Evolution of CMS

• CMS evoluted to Blog to mean personal web log : Management of categories, articles, and users...
• CMS evoluted to Ad Management softwre : Management of Ads, campaigns, stats ...
• CMS evoluted to MLM (Mailing list manager) : Management of users, lists, subscriptions, messages ...
• CMS evoluted to e-Shops or E-Commerce solutions : Management of products, reviews, users, stats ...
• CMS evoluted to E-learning : Management of courses, students, classes ...

The term "CMS" itself define more needs than requirements of website. Almost all CMS solution's developers try to fit the needs of everybody by creating plugins, hacks or additional modules. This resulted generally fork of the CMS into sub projects, or it become difficult to use, or a very resources gourmand !

That's what makes specific project development more popular and kept "CMS" for business level only.

CMS : developers point of vue

Companies and developers find CMS the best solution since it reduce the development time. An excellent solution for all their clients, with all their different needs. The problem is that clients asks always for some specifics changes that day after day make this CMS evolute to specific field more than another.

Conclusion

I think as many web projects that have been developed in the last decade, CMS is a vision for web application that could fit needs of everybody. But I think that the way we conceives these CMS is always making the difference from a solution to another and from a company to another. It's not a story about reinventing the web, but maybe a CMS pattern could be a solution.