Web Content Management System, The Good Of Its Capabilities
A CMS or Content Management System is a computer application used to manage work flow needed to collaboratively create, edit, review, index, search, publish and archive various kinds of digital media and electronic text. There are currently 5 types of CMS' used today. These are:
* Enterprise CMS (ECMS)
* Web CMS (WCMS)
* Document management system (DMS)
* Mobile CMS
* Component CMS
What I'm going to discuss today is about the Web Content Management System or WCMS. Considered as the second most used type of CMS, WCMS or Web CMS is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions.
The Good
According to some Web design specialists, the good of WCMS is that it usually provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease of use. Most systems use a database to store content, metadata, and/or artifacts that might be needed by the system. Content is frequently, but not universally, stored as XML, to facilitate reuse and enable flexible presentation options.
Most WCMS also use some form of server side caching which enables a boost of performance. This works best when the WCMS is not intended to be changed often but visits happen on a regular basis.
Unlike Web-site builders like Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe Dreamweaver, a WCMS allows non-technical users to make changes to an existing website with little or no training. A WCMS typically requires an experienced coder to set up and add features, but is primarily a Web-site maintenance tool for non-technical administrators. So what other capabilities that WCMS makes good?
WCMS Capabilities
Some Web design consultants have stated that WCMS provides the following key features:
* Automated templates - Create standard output templates (usually HTML and XML) that can be automatically applied to new and existing content, allowing the appearance of all content to be changed from one central place.
* Easily editable content - Once content is separated from the visual presentation of a site, it usually becomes much easier and quicker to edit and manipulate. Most WCMS software includes WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technical individuals to create and edit content.
* Scalable feature sets - Most WCMS software includes plug-ins or modules that can be easily installed to extend an existing site's functionality.
* Web standards upgrades - Active WCMS software usually receives regular updates that include new feature sets and keep the system up to current web standards.
* Workflow management - Workflow is the process of creating cycles of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in the CMS. For example, a content creator can submit a story, but it is not published until the copy editor cleans it up and the editor-in-chief approves it.
* Delegation - Some CMS software allows for various user groups to have limited privileges over specific content on the website, spreading out the responsibility of content management.
* Document management - CMS software may provide a means of managing the life cycle of a document from initial creation time, through revisions, publication, archive, and document destruction.
* Content virtualization - CMS software may provide a means of allowing each user to work within a virtual copy of the entire Web site, document set, and/or code base. This enables changes to multiple interdependent resources to be viewed and/or executed in-context prior to submission.
Types of WCMS
There are three major types of WCMS: offline processing, online processing, and hybrid systems. According to Web design Philippines consultants, these terms describe the deployment pattern for the WCMS in terms of when presentation templates are applied to render Web pages from structured content.
Offline Processing
These systems pre-process all content, applying templates before publication to generate Web pages. 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. Hosted CMSs are provided by such SaaS developers as AspireCMS, Bravenet, UcoZ, Webs and Crownpeak. Some of the better known open source systems that produce pages on demand include Redaxscript, Concrete5, Mambo, Joomla!, Drupal, TYPO3, Zikula and Plone, etc.
Hybrid Systems
Some systems combine the offline and online approaches. Some systems write out executable code (e.g. JSP, ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, or Perl pages) rather than just static HTML, so that the CMS itself does not need to be deployed on every Web server. Other hybrids, are capable of operating in either an online or offline mode.
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