From: Nicholas Wieland <invalid@...>
Date: 2005-01-17T17:41:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby CMS

- Patrick May :
>> Interesting.  CMS makes me think of an application that allows folks 
>> with little knowledge of (and no desire to learn) Web stuff to add, 
>> edit, and otherwise manage content.  CMS systems typically, I think, 
>> allow for assorted type of editing access, change notifications, and 
>> comments from readers/reviewers.
>>
>> Often a CMS is used to produce a  Web site, but I think they tend to 
>> be corporate intranets.
>>
>> So, I would see Rails, Seaside, etc as possibilities to use as 
>> groundwork for building a CMS.
>
> "content" and "data" are synonyms, as far as I can tell.  Tools for 
> working with databases (aka Rails) are tools for working with 
> "content".  I think CMS is a bit of Fire and Motion [1]

Well, they are a little bit more complex than that, the problem is that
CMSs have definitely reached the status of buzzword, so everyone has
it's own personal interpretation of what a CMS is :)
Basically, the most interesting part is the "management" one, "content"
is everything you want it to be.
The real value of a CMS is that it can publish heterogenous content and
centralize it, and for heterogenous I mean content that comes from
SAP, MS Word, Excel, other sites and so on: the CMS must define the
rules to fetch, catalog and publish this content, and in the 90% of
cases integrate everything in a worflow system. As always, everything is
reduced to a productivity gain: a CMS structures unstructured content by
following rules defined by the content manager.
This is a real simplistic way to define a CMS, just to say that, for
example, Drupal and Mambo are more like web publishers than real CMS.
Plone is quite complete, and probably if I had to choose a CMS for
tomorrow I'd choose that, for its extensibility.
A good example are products from Documentum... well, _some_ products
from documentum, their offer is a bit overwhelming :)

HAND,
  ngw

-- 
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	Oh my god, make (1) killed Kenny ! You, bastards !

nicholas_wieland-at-yahoo-dot-it