The short answer
This glossary defines the terms that come up when choosing and running a content management system for a news or article site, from editorial roles and revisions to headless delivery, structured data and feeds. Each definition is short and practical, and links to the guide or profile where the idea is explained in more depth.
Definitions are kept short. For the full picture, follow the links from the guides and CMS profiles: what a CMS is, how CMS licences work, how plugins and themes work, and headless publishing.
- 301 redirect
- A permanent redirect that sends visitors and search engines from an old URL to its new one.
- API
- A defined way for one piece of software to request data or actions from another, such as an app fetching articles from a CMS.
- Caching
- Keeping a ready-made copy of a page or file so it can be served quickly without rebuilding it for each visitor.
- Canonical URL
- The address a site declares as the main version of a page when the same content is reachable at more than one URL.
- CDN (content delivery network)
- A network of servers in many locations that stores copies of a site's files so visitors load them from a server near them.
- Content management system (CMS)
- Software for creating, editing, organising and publishing content, usually through a web interface, without editing code for each page.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's set of user-experience metrics covering loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability of a page.
- Editorial workflow
- The stages an article passes through before publication, such as draft, review and approval, and who is allowed to move it between them.
- Headless CMS
- A CMS that stores and manages content and delivers it through an API, leaving the website or app that displays it to separate code.
- hreflang
- An annotation that tells search engines which language or regional version of a page to show to which users.
- JSON-LD
- A format for writing structured data as a block of JSON in a page, the format search engines recommend for Schema.org markup.
- Membership
- A relationship where readers sign up, free or paid, in exchange for access, newsletters or other benefits, managed by the CMS or a separate service.
- Open-source licence
- A licence that lets anyone use, study, modify and share the software's source code, subject to the licence's conditions.
- Paywall
- A system that restricts some or all content to paying subscribers or registered readers.
- Plugin (module, extension)
- An add-on package that extends what a CMS can do without changing its core code.
- Preview
- Seeing exactly how an unpublished article will look on the live site before it is published, harder to provide in headless setups.
- Revision
- A saved earlier version of a page or article that can be compared with the current one or restored.
- Roles and permissions
- Named sets of rights, such as writer, editor or administrator, that control what each user can create, change or publish.
- RSS feed
- A machine-readable list of a site's latest items that feed readers, aggregators and other services can subscribe to.
- SaaS CMS
- A CMS sold as a hosted service: the vendor runs the software and you pay a subscription rather than installing it yourself.
- Scheduled publishing
- Setting an article to publish or unpublish automatically at a chosen date and time.
- Self-hosted
- Software you install and run on a server you control or rent, making you responsible for updates, security and backups.
- Slug
- The readable part of a URL that identifies a page, usually derived from its title, such as /cms-costs/.
- Source-available licence
- A licence that publishes the source code but restricts some uses, so it does not meet the usual definition of open source.
- Static site generator
- A tool that builds every page of a site into plain HTML files ahead of time, rather than assembling pages on each request.
- Structured data
- Machine-readable information added to a page, usually as JSON-LD using the Schema.org vocabulary, that describes what the page is about.
- Taxonomy
- The system of sections, categories and tags used to classify content and generate listing pages.
- Theme (template)
- The set of templates, styles and assets that control how a CMS displays content.
- Traditional (coupled) CMS
- A CMS that both manages content and renders the website itself from templates, so editing and display live in one system.
- XML sitemap
- A file listing a site's URLs, often with last-modified dates, to help search engines discover pages.