Types

There are three major types of WCMS: offline processing, online processing, and hybrid systems. These terms describe the deployment pattern for the WCMS in terms of when presentation templates are applied to render Web pages from structured content. Seth Gottlieb has used the terms 'baking', 'frying', and 'parbaking' to describe the three alternatives.

Offline processing
These systems pre-process all content, applying templates before publication to generate Web pages. sagar Vignette CMS and Bricolage are examples of this type of system. Since pre-processing systems do not require a server to apply the templates at request time, they may also exist purely as design-time tools; Adobe Contribute is an example of this approach.


Online processing
These systems apply templates on-demand. HTML may be generated when a user visits the page, or pulled from a cache. Some of the better known open source systems that produce pages on demand are Mambo, Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress, Zikula and Plone. Hosted CMSs are provided by such SaaS developers as Bravenet, UcoZ, Freewebs. Most Web application frameworks perform template processing in this way, but they do not necessarily incorporate content management features. Wikis, e.g. MediaWiki and TWiki generally follow an online model (with varying degrees of cacheing), but generally do not provide document workflow.

Hybrid Systems
Some systems combine the offline and online approaches. Some systems write out executable code (e.g. JSP, PHP, Perl pages) rather than just static HTML[citation needed], so that the CMS itself does not need to be deployed on every Web server. Other hybrids, such as Blosxom, are capable of operating in either an online or offline mode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_management_system