Copyright © 2005 Emiliano Bruni - Creative Commons License

The complete article can be found here in english language and here in italian.

Abstract.

The ideal solution to realize and update web contents in a collaborative environment or anyhow from whom is "not assigned to the jobs" requires the use of a content management system. Of these environments we'll analyze the salient characteristics for dealing therefore the main installation and property of one of theirs: WebGUI.

Content Management System

The world of the communication has been sure revolutionized by the advent of Internet, an instrument that supplies the opportunity of being "an active" element of the net becoming a supplier beyond that a reader of information and news. For this they are more and more situations in which the dynamic character consists in the rapid and constant update of its contents.

And so happens more and more often, that who must add and maintain such contents, often it do not have or it cannot have anything to make with the world of the HTML. In order to make these authors independent, it was made therefore to feel the necessity to supply with some easy instruments for the publication and management of web-based.

It's for this context that there are reasons to be those systems called Content Management System or C.M.S.

These products interpose between the author and the Web server allowing to execute operations of maintenance and management of the website in simple and natural way. Starting therefore from the problematic of generation of single several pages HTML to problematic the accessory ones that always accompany to the publication of new pages. Visualization from a date to a date, the automatic update of the menu and the site map in order to render account of the new inserted pages, indispensable restrictions to the access of the contents to single users authorizes are only some of the operations to have necessarily to execute in an anvironment web-based of collaborative type. If all it is not supported from a C.M.S., all these operations would be executed by hand.

But what is a C.M.S.? An official definition does not exist and it prefers to describe by enumerating common characteristics that a system must have for being defined such.

A C.M.S. must unavoidablly possess an editor for the generation and modification of the contents via browser, than it does not demand knowledge of the HTML or other technical slight knowledge. The authors can so directly insert the news inside of browser in a WYSIWYG editor.

The system must therefore supplies to publish the news automatically, the day defined by the author, by covering automatically with part of the graphical standard of the website. Contextually it must automatically generate the menu items and the relative link in order to allow to the access and navigation to the article itself.

An other common characteristic is given from the fact that a single article can be present in various pages of the website in different layout. Think, as an example, at the possibility to have, automatically, on the home page, for every new news inserted, an abstract of page, so that every modification, automatically changes the content of the first page.

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The complete article can be found here in english language and here in italian.