Skip to main content

The Evolution of Content Management

Edit: Seems Writely doesn't publish images onto here. Argh.

It is challenging to make a clear distinction that separates WCM systems from similar information systems. To explore this one must understand the possible ways to do web content management. Various architectures of implementation exist. One possible categorization is presented here.

These four levels are a way to divide the physical management of content. In general one can say that the higher use of web content in a company, the higher level its WCMS implementation should be. The separation is historical and drawn from my personal experience with web development through the last decade, therefore the evolutionary approach.

Static files on a web-server

The most basic strategy is to compose static HTML files and transfer these to a web server capable of serving such files to clients connecting to the web-site. It is possible to apply styles to the pages, for example with the help of cascading style-sheets (CSS).

Content wrapped in templates

The next level of content management is attained when the editor wishes to re-use the design of the web-site by dynamically including content into a frame of finished design, or a template. The content is typically contained in a text file the dynamic page engine

can read. Examples of technology capable of this are Server-Side Includes (SSI), Simple Common Gateway Interfaces (CGI) [Dudek, 2003] and XML-documents using XLST transformations [Weitzman, 2002]. The HTML standard also has a command called frames to include nested web-pages, although professional web designers and developers frown upon the use of this deprecated function [Nielsen, 1996].

Dynamically generated content

More complexity arrives as the re-use of templates is pushed further, having a template dynamically selecting content source based on a dynamic parameter. This is not possible with SSI as you have to provide each separate content page with its own physical HTML file. This means two files for any page on the web-site, one with content, another with design. Many find this to be too cumbersome and end up putting both files inside one, thereby mixing content and design. If a dynamic parameter is possible, as is the case with scripting languages such as PHP (a recursive acronym), Active Server Pages (ASP) or JavaServer Pages (JSP), one can have the template select and read the content file conditionally, thereby removing the need for its own HTML file [Challenger, 2005].

Content stored in a repository

The next step is to remove the content files to replace them with something more scalable. Native files have many disadvantages: they are not versionable, backup-routines require mirrored copies, search is not easy, binary files like picture and video can not be wrapped with meta data, there is no fitting access control and the possibilities for collaboration is limited. Instead the content is put inside some kind of repository, most likely a database, illustrated in Figure 5. Management of the content is subsequently handled by middle-ware that replace the programming interface of the file system.

A system developer will recognize this three-level architecture of the Model-View-Control (MVC) pattern [Reenskaug, 1978]. The model consists of the content in the database, the view-layer is provided by templates, and control is implemented in the middle-ware. The MVC is a pattern that offers a separation of concerns in the WCMS.

The next level

It is possible to invent further levels of content management, but any present form of WCMS will most likely apply some variation of the last level. Future levels might include technologies focusing on content integration and service orientation with the use of web services and mash-up principles [First Author, 2006]. Another direction in improving performance is distributed CMS networks [Voras, 2005], [Canfora, 2002].

Canfora, G., Manzo, S., Rollo, V. F., Villani, M. L. 2002, "ContentP2P: a peer-to-peer content management system", conference proceedings from COMPSAC'02, IEEE

Challenger, J., Dantzig, P., Iyengar, A. 2005, "A Fragment-Based Approach for Efficiently Creating Dynamic Web Content", 2, p. 359-389

Dudek, D. T., Wieczorek, H. A. 2003, "A Simple Web Content Management Tool as the Solution to a Web Site Redesign", conference proceedings from SIGUCCS'03, ACM

First Author 2006, "The Monster Mash-Up" [http://www.firstauthor.org/research_tools.html#Mashups] Retrieved 22. April, 2006

Nielsen, J. 1996, "Why Frames Suck (Most of the Time)" [http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html] Retrieved 22. April, 2006

Reenskaug, T. M. H. 2006, "MVC XEROX PARC 1978-79" [http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/mvc/mvc-index.html] Retrieved March 26, 2006

Weitzmann, L., Dean, S. E., Meliksetian, D., Gupta, K., Nianjun, Z., Wu, J. 2002, "Transforming the Content Management Process at ibm.com", Experience Design Case Study Archive

Voras, I., Zimmer, K., Zagar, M. 2005, "Distributing Web-based Content Management System - "FERweb"", conference proceedings from ITI 2005,

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant...

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE  in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password...

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org  - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio...

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be...

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config...