Web Based Content Management System

Designing A Web Based Content Management System

{Is this intended to be different than a WCMS?}

Introduction

The World Wide Web has grown and changed at a rapid pace over the past few years and is constantly redefining it self. As the web has become accessible to most people in the world more and more of its users have become contributors. As the number of contributors grows so do the possibilities. New languages, systems, architecture, communication methods and philosophy have been invented in order to support the rapid expansion of the web and its contributing population. However, this new breed of contributors isn�t what we�ve typically encountered in the past.

Even though they have made the leap from user to contributor they have done so with out the customary knowledge base and are instead utilizing tools crafted to manage the content of their site. It was necessary in the past to learn HTML in order to create a web site of static pages. Extremely difficult to maintain or update the prospect of manually managing content in static page architecture was usually enough to turn away the lesser dedicated. With the recent inventions of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the rise in popularity of scripting languages, such as PHP or Python, dynamic content delivery has become the main stay in managing content heavy web sites. Utilizing these new inventions Content Management Systems (CMS) have been developed to provide tools to ease the process of everything it takes to create and maintain a web site, thus allowing a contributor with no or little knowledge the ability to contribute on a larger scale. Most of these tools are bundled with free web space such as http://www.blogspot.com or http://www.livejournal.com.

I know I will risk starting a HolyWar by asking, but why not use a RDBMS? Also, how is "web content" different than any other content? Why would it deserve something special dedicated to it?

Wow, you found this fast. The reason I'm focusing on "web content" is for the reason of maintaining documentation in a browser friendly setting. I have two applications in mind at the moment, something for web logs (blogs) and something that would manage the HUGE amount of documents a co-worker is maintaining in a static HTML form. The solution I am envisioning would be database driven but would be interfaced via a web browser. Oh, and I take no offence to constructive criticism and am open to other suggestions.

Ok, I reread your questions and I see your point now. If a person where to create a content management system why limit ones self to purely to "web content". I think the problem is I've misnamed what I'm trying to accomplish. Instead of creating a system (which there are plenty of) I think I should have titled it Web Based Content Management Software, or something along those lines. My ultimate goal is to program software to manage media displayed across the internet.

Can any of you please help me understand what value you plan to add with this page? I just (9 January 2004) did a google search using the string "web based content management", and received "about 6,600,000" hits in return. I think we can therefore conclude that the idea of "designing A WebBasedContentManagementSystem" is neither original nor unique.

{Why is orginality required for a wiki topic?}

Perhaps I was wrong to bring this here, my idea was not to be original or unique but to assemble information that would aid in makeing something efficent. Perhaps I'll head back to google.

Perhaps we need some use cases to know the scope of what is being discussed. For example, all these could be involved: keeping track of stuff using explicit categories, text indexing (via parsing), word processing, etc.

What I had in mind was keeping track of text broken into categories and then displayed according to rules surrounding that category on assigned pages viewed from a web browser. Example, a co-worker maintains a static web page that has hundreds of individual pages. Each page describes something different in relation to operations of a server, program, or system here at at work. The guy really doesn't know what he's doing and needs something that can dynamicly manage this for him because if something changes, say a new person is in charge of a set of servers. He has to manually edit every static page. This, sometimes, causes broken links or bad "find and replace" issues.