CMS Guide
If you are from one of those who are working in an business enterprise, or manage a complex website that spans hundreds of pages of diverse content, chances are that the idea of a Content Management System is not new to you. From mid scale to humongous sized businesses deploy these software systems to manage the data that essentially runs their business, in an efficient and effective manner. Web Content Authors also use CMS, albeit of a little different type, to manage the content on their sites that would otherwise take a lot of people to get control of. Both of these types of CMS manage the content at a level of abstraction known as document level. A document is the smallest unit that these systems deploy as their output. This document could be made up of text. Images, and in case of digital documents, may be pictures and videos.
But sometimes the need arises of accessing the content at a much more granular level. Traditional CMSs becomes useless as far as such needs are concerned. So there is another type of CMS systems, which are rather a concept than a physical system, known as Component Content Management Systems.
A Component CMS uses much smaller items or components as their basic unit of output generation and hence can organize and manipulate content in an entirely different way, which is more efficient and reliable. A component can be a single topic, a paragraph, a concept or an asset like image, audio or video. These individual components are assembled to form content assemblies or content types that can be viewed as traditional document. But even after taking form of a complete document, each component can has an attributes as well as lifecycle of its own and it can be tracked down individually as the part of that assembly.
So in this way, the Component CMS works its way out from individual components to a complete document. Because of their very nature, Component CMSs can be used a standalone system or as a part of a bigger, more complex CMS also. The benefits of using these systems are manifold. Using these systems, redundancy of data is removed as the same component can be used to create multiple documents. Delivery cost is reduced since no duplicate components are delivered, one copy is used everywhere. Plus if the system requires some translation of content, which is quiet common in Web CMSs, the translation cost is also reduced as a component is needed to be translated only once.
Content Management Systems have great utility for any kind of task that requires management of data in an organized way thereby providing clean, non redundant storage, highly efficient retrieval and secure, hassle free housekeeping of data. Content Management Systems have grown up in many different forms today, like Enterprise CMSs, Component CMs, but the form of CMS that is immensely popular today between both corporations and regular people today are Web Based CMSs. Internet is getting closer to reach of common man day by day and the ease of creating and managing web content that a CMS provides have found it many users in very less time.
A Web based Content Management system basically works by providing a well defined, easy to use, abstract interface to the user for creating and managing content online for different types of online applications, be it regular websites, blogs, wikis and what not. The user doesn’t have to be aware of the technological gimmicks that are working behind the system and can just publish contents just being like a publisher using content publishing software.
Web CMS are written and designed in High Level programming languages including PHP, ASP and not ASP.NET. Of these PHP is the hot favorite as it is free and is in market long before ASP.NET. The system is very modular in nature and consists of tightly coupled independent parts working together.
At the core of the system, there is a storage subsystem, generally handled by a Relational Database Management System like MySQL, MS SQL Server etc. This subsystem is responsible for storing all the data and maintaining its integrity. Data is stored in form of 2 dimensional tables also called relations.
On the top of it is a basic framework that handles the low level, plumbing details of the system and serves as a base for the other module. This layer usually provides a set of APIs to perform core tasks. On the top of it there are other modules working which includes a Template System which handles the "View" aspect of the system and provides standardized way to the user to create and edit contents. Another part of the system called Dashboard combines with the framework layer and Template system to provide user with the interface to interact with the system as well as to manage and optimize it.
User creates and edits the contents using dashboard which in turn manages it using templates and all of this goes through the framework layer to be finally stored in the database. In this way, content is created, stored and managed in an organized way.
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