Website Content Management Systems allow internal users/administrators to provide new website content in the form of articles. The articles are typically entered as plain text or through a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWG) editor, thus not requiring the internal users have website coding skills. Outside of plain text content, these systems allow for placement of multimedia, image or other web content types.

CMS then uses rules to style the article, separating the display from the content, which has a number of advantages when trying to maintain pages with a consistent "look and feel". The system then adds the articles to a larger collection for publishing

The systems also often include some sort of concept of the workflow for the internal users, which defines how the new content is to be routed around the system.