Web Content Management
Web Content Management System, also referred to as WCMS refers to a software method to help authoring websites while also providing a user having less knowledge about languages of web programming, with collaborative and administrative tools. This system gives the “less-knowledgeable” user the independence for creating and managing website in a relatively easy manner. A strong WCMS gives way for collaboration, giving users the capability of managing documents and also to give output for editing and participation by multiple authors.
Many systems make use of a database for storing contents of a page, the metadata as also the other assets, which carry information, which could be the requirements the system needs. The presentation layer begins displaying content on the website, which can be seen by a visitor depending on a collection of templates. These templates could be XSLT files. A number of systems make user of a function that sets caching to the server side so as to have an improvement in performance. It works the best provided the WCMS remains unchanged and there are regular visits. Administration is mostly done with the help of interfaces that are browser based, however some of the systems require using fat client.
A WCMS enables the users, with less technical expertise to execute changes in a website. Typically, WCMS would require one systems administrator along with the web developer for adding features. However, it is a tool for website maintenance for the non-technical personnel. Majorly, there are 3 types in WCMS – first is offline processing, second is online processing with hybrid systems being the third kind. They are concerned with the way of deployment pattern in the WCMS with respect to the time the presentation templates get applied for rendering the web pages from the structured content.
Online processing – In these kind of systems, the templates are applied on demand. HTML can be generated at a time when a particular user makes a visit to the page or can also be taken from cache. Many of the WCMS, which are open source can support add-ons, thus providing extended capabilities which includes blog, forum, wiki, photo galleries, web stores, contact management etc. They are mostly called as modules, widgets, nodes, extensions or add-ons. Add-ons could either be open-source or even a paid one. Web Content Systems can significantly differ in terms of features and target audience.
Hybrid Systems – Systems that use the combination of approaches from both online and offline processing are referred to as hybrid systems. There are systems that can write executable code than just HTML, which is static. This makes it unnecessary for the deployment of CMS on all the web servers. Examples of such system include ASP, JSP, PHP, ColdFusion etc. There are also hybrids that can either operates in offline or online mode.
WCMS offers the advantage of maintaining and updating websites either free of cost or at really affordable prices as many of them are very simple to use and offer complete control to the owner of the website as to how and who can publish content to their website.
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