It is useless to reject a great meaning of Internet today. In is not just a temporary phenomenon, it has already become a natural part of our life. As the time spins, our life is migrating online, and nobody can predict what will the final point of this process be. Today Internet is not only about business, it is where people socialize, rest, study. It’s not a tool anymore, but a place.

One of the main incarnations of some-one’s online presence is a website, no matter what is the purpose it was created for. But still a creation of website remains to be a prerogative of specially-educated people, and is a kind of a rocket science for majority. People know that developing a website is about coding, and coding is a magic spell for most of them.This is the reason why developers now put so much effort trying to erase this barrier, so that website set up and managing could be a process that can be performed by any human at any moment of time. This is what the main idea of the CMS is.

CMS are a bridge between people and their websites, they allow to set up and manage websites without any specific knowledge. In fact, they work like a magic wand: you do not need to study magic of coding, memorize secret spells (read tags), all you need to do is to wave with your wand and say “I want a website!“…. and here it comes.

CMS are not a know-how anymore, but their evolution is still at the beginning stage. As it is clear from the name – CMS, or content managing systems, they are meant to manage content, which is add/change/remove all types of the information presented on a website. All the actions you can perform in terms of content are about its editing, but not about changing the way it is  presented on a web page. All appearance-related functions are limited to basic operations with text and other types of content; more complex operations demand special software and/or skills.

The variety of CMS presented today is great, they differ with the range of functions they provide, by their main purpose and many more other criteria. Some CMS are very-well developed, have a large amount of components available for them and a nice interface, and due to all this are considered to be universal. Among the most popular are Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal and some others,  though  some of them initially were created to serve specific needs (WordPress as a blog manager, Data Life for news resources, Drupal – for social networks).  In fact, as you read descriptions of these CMS and look through a list of components available for each of them, it might seem that anything the user can  need is possible.

But time sets a new  level of merit for every generation. Today the functions of CMS are not sufficient to suit contemporary needs, though may be it is not quite obvious yet.
Future is about highly interactive websites, revolutionary designs and touch screens, if you want. It will not  be a mistake to say that we are standing on the edge of huge changes in the way content is organized on the website, the very structure of the website designs. If you try looking at the websites listed in beautiful websites showcase, you will hardly find there standard column designs with what we all are used to see. Instead, you will see there a great percentage of websites created in flash, with spectacular effects and unusual structure.

Flash websites Colorchakra and ImagineAir

Future is about flash. Among the first evidences of these changes are so-called flogs, or flash blogs, that are becoming more and more popular these days. Flash websites are notable for their unmatchable flexibility not only in design, but in terms of website managing as well. It is not only content that needs to be edited, but also the structure of the website, the disposition of basic elements, and sometimes the whole design as well. And there is no need in any extra software, precisely anything you need to do can be done with your CMS.

If you try to compare the possibilities provided by flash and non-flash CMS, compare their main features, here are the points you will see the difference at:

Flash CMS are actually very different from what is usually meant under this name. They do have all the functions of a regular CMS, but they have even much more. Flash CMS is not only a content manager, in fact there is a possibility to manage anything about your website using it. Such CMS has a lot from a site builder. The amount of functions a flash CMS provides is not a question of technical possibilities, much more it is a question of what the developer of CMS has decided to add as a function. It depends a lot on the purpose of a CMS.

There is also a point of security, as the CMS needs to care that an amateur user does not do some fatal changes by accident. To avoid this, there needs to be a diversification for content, design and functional. This question was hard to solve for flash CMS of the first generation, but in the last days we can see flash CMS of a brand new level being released. They provide a strict division between logically different parts, what makes using a CMS be simple and safe.

Flash is still young, but its potential is huge.  As the amount of flash websites online grows, more and more flash CMS (flashcmsreview.com) are being offered too. It is useless now to compare existing flash CMS and non-flash ones, as they are now on totally different stages of their evolution. The thing is that the potential possibilities of flash make expectations be much higher, and there is a lot to be revised. Though many still argue, it is becoming evident, that flash is turning out to be not a  type of websites (and CMS as well), but a new step of their evolution.