Web content management systems have now be overtaken by digital experience platforms, but nevertheless, let us persist with the term Content Management Systems or CMS — after journalists it forms the backbone of any journalistic endeavour. The choice of the CMS often makes or breaks a digital transformation of the newsroom. Quite often journalists too are involved in the decision-making process of zeroing in on the best fit of a CMS for a organisation, but pretty often, if it isn’t the technical department then it might just be the fact that “WordPress CMS is available free and not very expensive to customise” trumps all other considerations.

The CMS is the most important tool in the journalists’ workday. And it isn’t just about the desk either. Bureaus better be bothered about what the content management system is going to be like.  Quite often the “technical stuff” thrown around when talking about a CMSs can be either daunting or boring or both — it’s wouldn’t be a surprise if the editorial team about CMS feature they need. But it is in our interest to be at the centre of deciding what tool we would like to play with. For that we need to know what CMS lingo, and maybe a bit more.

A couple of things before we jump into that:

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It is a software architectural style that developers use in application programming interface or APIs. “APIs are the little pieces of code that make it possible for digital devices, software applications, and data servers to talk with each other.”  So it an architecture that software developers use so that a CMS can talk to other devices, applications and the data stored by the newsroom.