The Evolution of CMS (or how you too can now kick Web butt)
Invention has many mothers. Aside from necessity, which we get from the old saying, there is also thrift, boredom, sloth and efficiency.
I wrote my first CMS (content management system) tool in 2002 using Visual Basic 6.0. I wanted to maintain a blog, but did not want to use one of the popular blog hosting sites that used banner adds. I also wanted control over how I skinned the site, and archived the stories. I wanted to host it on my ISP’s free static hosting, and wanted control over this data should I move it to another hosting solution.
My solution was to build a series of templates that would represent portions of the blog page. This would include the header, footer, navigation, and repeating items such as the stories, and links in the navigation. The repeating items had field variables that would be populated from an Access database. No need for speed. The final HTML would be spit out into static pages, and FTPed up to the site for viewing friends and relatives.
I had not really though about my solution as being a CMS tool until I began to work with a company who was using a Web-based solutions to build pages for its clients. Though much more complicated and powerful, the basic principles were the same: Use templates to constrain the authored content into a site that maintained a uniform style and branding. We designed the templates. The clients delivered pages of content. The result was sites that consisted of several hundred pages of information, skinned with a professional look, and a user interface that was a pleasure to navigate.
We had come a long way from the DMS or document management systems where raw MS Word and PDF documents were loaded into a database drive Web site and viewed with one of the skins provided by the maker of that solution. DMS had and still has its place for maintaining secure knowledge bases, but CMS allowed us to start building large professional looking sites with multiple authors who did not need or care to know HTML, CSS, Javascript and the like.
Today’s Web and database servers have the power to keep the content for sites in their database form. It was once more popular to extract those pages into a more raw HTML form, and publish the site from a database driven staging server to a static site. End user needs have so much going on with databases in the back end of the site these days, it just makes more sense to keep the whole of the site’s content in the database and serve it to the user on the fly. If the demands start to become a burden on the database, most Web technologies have the ability to cache that information, thus automating the process that we used to do manually.
Whether you are blogging articles on a site for fun or work, using a product like Nuke to maintain information and forums, or participating on an enterprise content management site, you are experiencing the benefits of CMS. The Web is no longer ruled by the “geeks” who know how to use FrontPage and Dreamweaver. If you have thoughts you wish to share with the world on an attractive organized Web site, CMS is your ticket.
The CMS that we have developed here at dd|a is the most robust we have created, with an array of solutions for a variety of needs; from simple brochure Web sites that just require infrequent maintenance by an administrator with no coding knowledge through to multi-layered CMS tools that have levels of permission, approval powers, content control and version recording for Web sites regulated by Federal watchdogs.
David Day | Associates
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