CMS is the accronym for Content Management System. CMS sites are becoming increasingly popular because the owners of websites want to be able to add to and change them without the need to call on the services of a web developer.

If you'd wanted a decent CMS site five years ago you'd have had to fork out a fair bit of money for the privilege. These days, however, they are far more affordable to commission. The reason? Three Open Source CMS systems have now matured into reliable, secure and extensible platforms. They are readily styled and customised, and are written using the world's most popular scripting language, PHP. They all run on MySQL, a high performance relational database which comes as standard on most hosting packages.

The three main flavours of Open Source CMS are Joomla!, Wordpress and Drupal. All are based on the same underlying technology, your choice of system depends very much on the functionality you want from your site. I can advise you on this.

I won't bother going into all the minutiae of the different systems here - you can easily Google for those if you are interested.

What is worth mentioning are the main benefits of all three systems. Aside from the obvious benefit that you can control the look, layout, and content of your site yourself, there is a bigger plus - these systems are all designed so that you can plug-in new functions.

Want a booking management system which seamlessly integrates into the rest of your site? I would purchase a plug-in or component that handles bookings, and configure and customise it for you. The same goes for an almost inexhaustible list of other functions - newsletters, galleries, CRM systems, forums, job advertisements, catalogues...

The upshot is that for a very reasonable price you can have the kind of functionality that, only a few years ago, nobody but big budget players could afford.