Dynamic Web Content Management

Along with the growth of the Internet, and its increasing penetration of real business structures, there is an increasing number of people whose direct responsibilities include publishing various information on the web.

At first, nearly all of those people were professional programmers who could easily use the mark-up language (HTML) for formatting documents and use a certain file structure for allocating.

Then, due to the considerable expansion of the Internet community, various systems for visual editing of documents and support of static web sites (those being a set of HTML pages) appeared, including FrontPage, DreamViewer, HomeSite, etc. The above systems can be used for creating and modifying static sites without having any special skills or going into much detail of how the HTML works. 

At the moment, such systems may fail to satisfy growing business demands for many reasons, so a new system generation is emerging, the so- called web publishing, or web content management, systems. What are their key advantages? 

Static sites and the HTML language

The HTML language being a common standard and the technological base of the Internet today is suited to determining a document's appearance. It is in the form of HTML documents that static site pages exist. Besides content, each page includes, as a rule, a certain framework: a site header, a menu, auxiliary links for easy navigation and other elements. Thus, certain document pages include both content and design, that of the very document and the site as a whole. 

There are a number of negative effects of that. First one should note the difficulty in publishing new documents and editing existing ones, as they should be properly formatted taking into account the style, and should include certain standard framing. 

Normally, present-day sites contain more than one link to each content document: those in the topical index section, the general chronological index and, finally, at the first page as far as the document is new. For that reason, document publishing involves not only adding a page but also changing three to four other pages, which multiplies the difficulties, and results in the risk of spoiling the design. Site structure or design modification in turn becomes a serious problem, requiring the alteration of all pages published.

On-line user community support

Creating and supporting on-line communities is now one of the main trends of electronic business development as it is on-line communities that are the basic capital of any Internet project. All available means should be employed to attract visitors and to help such a community to develop. 

Community support usually implies the following:

• visitor registration and authentication: a site should provide means for registering and "recognizing" visitors;
• dividing users into different groups having different information access rights, e.g. occasional visitors, customers, employees, the administrator; 
• personalization: the opportunity to select and save settings reflecting individual preferences related to the site appearance; 
• possibility of direct communication both within the community and with site owners: forums, guest books, chats, surveys, etc.; 
• e-mail integration: subscription to news, etc. 

All these features can hardly be implemented using the static site technology, and would require some programming in that case. Palliative solutions involving inclusion of separate scripts that extend the capabilities of a basically static site cannot solve most problems, while dramatically increasing site qualification and implementation requirements. 

Business processes support

Web infrastructure development progressively leads to using web-oriented applications for both internal corporate automation (Intranet) and interface with customers (Extranet). Business processes that are displayed are far more complicated than the off-line preparation for the publication chain, which is a characteristic of static sites. During preparation, the document passes through several processing stages where different people are involved before it reaches its final condition.

For instance, let us take a look at the work of on-line media editorial staff. As a rule, an author prepares the material and uploads it to the site from home, rather than the office. At the site, the material becomes available to the editor who conducts correspondence with the author; the correspondence should ideally be carried on at the site. Then, after the author's revision and editor's approval, the material goes to the proof-reader and, possibly, to the commissioning editor who actually approves it for publishing.

Another example may be an electronic shop where a customer places an order. The manager responsible for work with customers checks the order and either rejects it or passes for execution. The customer can cancel his order until it has been sent. When the order is sent to the customer, the information is recorded correspondingly. After delivery and payment, order monitoring stops and the order passes to the archive. Both the manager and the buyer should be able to monitor the order status at any time. 

It is extremely hard to implement business processes support using static sites. All these things considered, one could conclude that present-day professional sites should be dynamic. 

Web content management systems

Web content management systems or web publishing systems offer an optimal solution for those problems. Due to restrictions imposed on logical structure of the content, appearance (design) and functionality of dynamic sites created, such systems mean drastically decreasing the labour intensiveness of developing and supporting a site.

All content management systems are a certain type of software installed at a web server and meant for the creation of dynamic web sites and their maintenance. All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, imply separating content and design, working with communities, supporting business processes and minimizing programmer effort when developing a site. All systems use databases for content storage and manage both content and design through a web interface.

Most of these systems can operate in the hosting mode, i.e., a service provider can place a content management system on its server, allowing customers to create their personal sites there at relatively low costs.

Zope

The Zope system is a freeware developed within the framework of the Open Source Software Project. The company supporting and developing Zope-based applications is called Digital Creations Inc; the web site of the project is located at www.zope.org. The system can be considered with two aspects: as a programming system allowing skilled Python developers to create powerful and complicated web sites, and as a content management system which can be used for implementing a site and producing its content without any programming.

The Zope can be considered as being among the content management systems having most functions, though so far it can be used in full only by a programmer (developer) who will search and test complete solutions rather than do programming. However, for an expert in Python programming, Zope is a most powerful web solutions development tool. Zope is used as a base for the dynamic content management system iNetSite, a comprehensive software product for interactive creation and consecutive maintenance of a Web site irrespective of its complexity or purpose.