Web Content Management Systems

Web Content Management Systems are designed to allow users with little or no web design or programming experience to maintain and update content on a web site. They often provide a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor for the content, along with security for granting access to update or delete content, and some kind of workflow management for the content. Workflow management may include entry, approval, and publishing steps so that a user can enter new content. However, another level of security is required to approve and publish that content. Content is often dated, sometimes with an expiration date, and reusable on other pages of the site.

The site itself is usually templated in some manner, separating content from the presentation layer of the CMS, and the coding for the site is hidden from the users. In this setup, a programmer would create the application and provide enhancements to it, a designer would create the look and feel, and content authors and editors would work solely with the content to be displayed.

In many cases, there may be restricted content, viewable by only a specific class of users, and there would be a user management system to handle the creation of users and assignment of permissions. There will normally be some sort of navigation mechanism, and a search mechanism would make retrieving content easier for the end user. For a Content Management System to be useful, content should be dynamic, and should be displayed to specific users, based on specific queries or navigation choices.

A CMS is not necessarily a portal, a community site, a group of forums, or an e-commerce site. While these sites will often have content management as part of their functionality, they are not part of a CMS by default. On the other hand, blogs are purely content management—articles and comments are the content, and it's only the fact that the template creates a blog style which makes them a blog. There's really no difference between an online newspaper and a blog, or a site full of product documentation. All of them have specific content, whether articles, blog posts, or documents, which needs to be managed.

Over the course of this book, we will develop a Web Content Management System, and we'll use the acronym CMS for this. We'll program a basic content system based on articles, along with workflow for the process. This will require a user security system, based on membership of groups that are allowed to perform certain tasks, and we'll add a template system to provide for the layout of the pages separate from the content. We'll use ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer, and SQL Server 2005 Express as our environment, although you should feel free to use tools you are comfortable with, provided they are compatible.