Web content management early days

Author: addisonliam

WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (WCMS)

A Web content management system is typically a software tool used by both technical and non- technical staff to manage the creation of structured web pages for a web based experience such as internet website, intranet or extranet solution.

A robust WCMS provides the foundation for collaboration, offering users the ability to manage documents and output for multiple author editing and participation.

Most systems use a Content Repository or a database to store page content, metadata, and other information assets that might be needed by the system.

A presentation layer displays the content to website visitors based on a set of templates. Sometime called XSLT files.

HISTORY OF WCMS

If you go back 15 years or so – the only way that you create a website was by understanding ‘HTML'. Products like Dreamweaver and Front page were not around - which meant that pretty much if you wanted to have a website (internet, extranet, intranet) then you needed someone with technical skills to write it - but not only that - once they had written it you still needed someone technical to change it - as it involved reading HTML code to determine where to add content.

As a result of the above - anyone with a website pretty much ran a 'centralised creation process' for web content.

WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT EARLY DAYS

Web content management systems were developed to resolve the issue of having highly experienced technical staff adding low level content to a website from vendors you would (and still do) here phrases like ‘decentralised content creation' or ‘separation of layout from content'. In essence, a WCMS was invented to allow non technical staff to create or amend web pages without the need to involve the technical staff

In order to characterise a WCMS we could say the following;

It manages small units of information (web pages) - each unit of information is interconnected via a navigation structure or path.
Each unit (web page) is defined by its location on the site - hierarchies of information are created by the location of each unit in relation to all the other units of information within the overall web event. Further definition can be created by 'verticals' of navigation that determine the type of information stored under it
It is focused primarily on page creation and editing - it facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential web maintenance functions by presenting the non technical user with an interface that requires no knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content.
It provides a publishing engine that allows created or amended content to be made available to a website visitor
It often provides an approval process or workflow that ensures that content is validated before it is released or published to a website.
WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT TODAY

There are very few web content management tools on the market today that talk only about the process of creating and managing content. As the web surffers have evolved to demand enhanced user experiences – driven by using tools like ebay and amazon – and the dominace of social tools like Linkedln, Twitter and Facebook in driving what users ‘expect' as an enhanced journey – so too have the WCMS tools.

CAPABILITIES

This system is used to control the dynamic collection of web material such as – HTML document ,images and other media forms. A WCMS has following features.

Automated templates
Access Control
Scalable expansion
Easily editable content
Scalable feature sets
Web standards upgrades
Workflow management
Collaboration
Delegation
Document management
Content virtualization
Content syndication
Multilingual
Versioning
TYPES

There are three types of WCMS we could say the following.

Offline processing

This is a pre- process of all content in a systems, applying templates before publication to generate Web pages.They may purely a design – time tools.

Online processing

This is a on-demand process on apply templetes. HTML may be generated when a user visits the page or pulled from a web cache.

Hybrid systems

In this systems it is oprate either offline or onlin mode. Some systems write out executable code (e.g., JSP, ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, or Perl pag

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