The essence of these two roles is that they give permission for content to be made visible to its intended front-end audience.

Moderators simply approve or reject contributions, usually those which come from the font-end, whereas editors frequently modify the contributions of others prior to publication.

Editors can be put in charge of a workflow, which enables them to commission and manage contributions.

They may also get involved in modifying content submitted by contributors. In most organisations, content will be written by people who know what they are writing about, because it is part of their job, but they may well have issues with expressing their knowledge in clear prose.

In the back-end, structures are available to support editors:

• The work flow system enables them to commission and manage the production of content
• The Digital Asset Management system allows digital material to be stored with categories and other meta information
• Any page or content element can be made invisible to visitors until approved. This is mainly useful for new, additional, content elements and pages
• Workspaces and versioning provide the possibility to work on different versions of the same site or page. When ready, the whole or parts of a page can be replaced or exchanged.
  This is mainly useful for editing existing content, or completely updating page content and/or layout.