Content management systems, or CMSes, for the Web help teams of contributors to manage a Web site.  Typically they will handle security and user authentication, content workflow (path from draft to publication), content creation and editing, file uploading, searching, and publication control.  CMSes offer tools to allow people without skills in HTML or other Web publishing languages to add publish pages to a website.

CMSes help teams collaborate to edit and publish content to the Web. If you are looking to create a new Web presence for your IMCOOL campaign, and would like to support a team of users to create and edit the site, you might consider one of the many CMSes available to you.  This page provides a description, some recommendations, and pointers to more information.  

Fully Hosted Solutions

We assume that you will have some ability to host your own websites, either on your own servers, or on space provided to you by a web hosting provider, and therefore recommend products that allow you more control over your CMS.  If you do wish to use a more turnkey, but limited, fully hosted solution, you might look at Terapad, http://www.terapad.com/ for a very simple website or UCoz, http://www.ucoz.com which offers a few more content management features but less in terms of visual control. 

Open Source Web CMS Software

Open source software is free and freely available software, and much of it is among the most used and best softwarea available for web publishing.  Three of the standouts are Plone, Drupal, and WordPress.

Plone excels at extensibility and security, and has perhaps the most intuitive user interface for editing and publishing content.  It requires more server resources and is typically more expensive to host than the other suggested solutions.  

Drupal is a full featuerd, widely used Web CMS based on the popular PHP language.  It is also fairly extensible, and offers a larger base of consultants, but does not have as nice a UI as Plone.  There is a particular focus on social networking applications within the Drupal community.  You can demo Drupal here.

WordPress was designed as a blog publishing platform, but can serve as a simple Web CMS, as well.  It is limited in terms of content control, and you may find that it is more difficult than with the other choices to be able to edit multiple parts of the page with a nice user interface.  Security is not as tight as with the other two suggested.  Still, it is relatively quick and easy to set up a basic installation and there are many consultants who can help with  WordPress.  It is also available fully hosted at http://www.wordpress.com, but this option probably will not give you enough control to really use it as a CMS.

For a more thorough comparison of Web CMSes, see Idealware's CMS comparison report. 

Web CMS Consultants

Web Collective, who built this website with Plone, offers consulting in Plone and WordPress.  You can find lists of consultants for each CMS on the CMS websites.