Abstract Theme "Web content management system" Compiler: Mirgorod V.S.

Actuality of work

At the beginning internet there was a problem: refreshing of site information was very difficult. In this process both programmer and content manager took part. There was another problem of duplicating information on site’s pages. To remove programmer’s role from the cycle of refreshing information on site, web content management systems were developed.

A Web content management system (WCMS or Web CMS) is content management system (CMS) software, usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It 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.

ContemporaryWCMS are very diversiform. Some of them strictly specialized, another are very large and have a lot of different options - that is difficult for user. Also there are high template restrictions in large WCMS. Not enough documentation in other then English languages. Such systems have difficult for understanding core and can be used only by professionals.  Small systems are very simple and not so useful, but there may not be template restrictions.

Demands to the contemporary web content management system

1. Open source
2. Good help system
3. Different database support
4. Web 2.0 support
5. Groups, user, roles management
6. Access control management
7. Collaborativework on content
8. Content version control
9. Content types management
10. Ability user to comment any of content
11. Content publication / concealment
12. Taxonomy
13. Menu structure management
14. Human URLs support
15. Module structure of CMS
16. Data export in RSS format
17. Multilanguage support
18. Ability to update system
19. Logging of user actions

Types of CMS

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 Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and Plone. Most Web application frameworks perform template processing in this way, but they do not necessarily incorporate content management features.

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.

Developing of CMS

Purpose of master’s work is to analyze some working mechanisms of CMS, to understand new ways of realization of such mechanisms. They are templates, taxonomy, cashing, user roles management, search engine optimization aids, content types management, etc.

The work on content management system has been started. Realized functions:

1. Menu management

2. Page management

3. Template management

4. Module management (fig. 1)

5. Variable management

6. Multilingual support

Figure 1 - module management модуля «Каталог».

Future plans

1. Analyzing mechanisms of working of contemporary WCMS
2. Realization new ways of  working mechanisms in developing WCMS

References

     1. Wikipedia, the free encyclopediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/
     2. Open Source Systems http://www.opensourcecms.com/
     3. The Content Management Comparison Tool http://www.cmsmatrix.org/