What is CMS?

What is cms and how do internetmarketers in the US make their websites?

[tilbryllupet]

Hi there!
I'm reading about CMS, but I'm from Norway, and I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what it actually is.. Can anyone please give me a short and "simple to understand" definition on it?

Also, I'm very interested in internet marketing, I have a small webshop myself, I spend about 6 months writing the thing in textpad using html, php and javascript. - Norwegian people doesen't exactly do it the easy way I think, at least I'm not, but from now on I will be thinking smarter, and therefor I have to ask you guys.. When you make pages to profit from, whether it is webshops, affiliate sites, one-product-shops, article directories or whatever.. how do you make the pages? Do you pay someone to make them? Do you use frontpage or dreamweaver, do you write them yourself?

I guess I'm asking for some ideas on how to develop good pages without having to write ten's of thousands of php lines in textpad?

And also.. how the %#"% do you make the pages look like thay have been made in plain html even if it is a index.php which runs the whole site.. i'm talking about NOT having the urls like
domain.com/index.php?group=hello&site=indonesia
I want the pages to be generated in html.. if you understand what I mean..
I think wwWebmasterWorldeddingfavors.com gives you an idea on what I'm looking for regarding the urls..

I would love to get some answers...

[Dijkgraaf]

CMS=Contents Management System
See [en.wikipedia.org...]
Basically it allows you to create template pages, which then non-technical users can fill with contents without needing to no HTML or other programming language.

Usually this is achieved through having most of the contents stored in a database or other repository and dynamically server up.

There are various ways of making those horrible long URL's appear to be actual html pages instead.
Key phrases to search for include
URL Rewrite
Custom 404 page
and probably a few more methods, but can't think of them at the moment.

[I Will Make It]

Thank you very much for your reply.
I also posted this question in anoher forum here on WW, because I found it to be better placed there.
I recieved quite a lot of answers, and I'm now much more into the CMS question.
I also learned that I could use a mod rewrite function in my .htaccess file to escape from those bad url's.

But here is a thank u 2 u 2 ;)

[I Will Make It]

ohh. sorry, forgot to tell.. I've changed my nick
I used to be tilbryllupet ;)

No I_Will_Make_It