Types of WCMS

There are three major types of WCMS: offline processing, online processing, and hybrid systems. These terms describe the deployment pattern for the WCMS in terms of when presentation templates are applied to render Web pages from structured content.

Offline processing

• These systems pre-process all content, applying templates before publication to generate Web pages. Vignette CMS and Bricolage are examples of this type of system. Since pre-processing systems do not require a server to apply the templates at request time, they may also exist purely as design-time tools; Adobe Contribute is an example of this approach.

Online processing

• These systems apply templates on-demand. HTML may be generated when a user visits the page, or pulled from a cache. Hosted CMSs are provided by such SaaS developers as AspireCMS, Bravenet, UcoZ, Freewebs and Crownpeak.
• Some of the better known open source systems that produce pages on demand include Concrete5, Mambo, Joomla!, Drupal, TYPO3, Zikula and Plone, etc…
• DotNetNuke is a partially open source CMS that runs on asp.net and is free to download and install. DNN produces pages on demand but levels and types of caching can be set. There are also many additional “modules” that can be purchased or installed for free to extend the functionality of DNN as needed, many of which create data and content dynamically.
• Most Web application frameworks perform template processing in this way, but they do not necessarily incorporate content management features. Wikis, e.g. MediaWiki and TWiki generally follow an online model (with varying degrees of caching), but generally do not provide document workflow.

Hybrid Systems

• Some systems combine the offline and online approaches. Some systems write out executable code (e.g. JSP, ASP, PHP,ColdFusion,Perl pages) rather than just static HTML, so that the CMS itself does not need to be deployed on every Web server. Other hybrids, such as Blosxom, are capable of operating in either an online or offline mode.

osCommerce

osCommerce (“open source Commerce”) is an e-commerce and online store-management software program. It can be used on any web server that has PHP and MySQL installed. It is available as free software under the GNU General Public License.

osCommerce was started in March 2000 in Germany by project founder and leader Harald Ponce de Leon as The Exchange Project. While osCommerce is still officially in its development stage, the current Milestone 2.2 release (Release Candidate 2a) is considered stable. As of August 2008 the osCommerce site says that there are over 14,000 ‘live’ websites using the program.  This number is almost certainly conservative, given the inclusion of osCommerce in hosting panel application installers such as Fantastico (web hosting) and its dependency on osCommerce users linking their sites into the osCommerce Live Stores listings.

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ImpressCMS

ImpressCMS is a free, open source , community-developed content management system for building and maintaining dynamic web sites, written in the PHP programming language and using a MySQL database.

The ImpressCMS Project was formed in late 2007 as a result of a division in the XOOPS community[1]. Many of the developers for ImpressCMS were veteran developers, designers and users with extensive experience with XOOPS and sought to establish a new community built CMS with a philosophy of openness, community contributions and continual improvements in code and features. The core platform of ImpressCMS was inherited from XOOPS, but was quickly transformed into a product distinct from its parent, yet maintaining compatibility with modules and themes originally designed for XOOPS. This compatibility allows users a choice of platforms and provides them a migration path to ImpressCMS.

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CMS Made Simple

CMS Made Simple is an open source (GPL) package, built using PHP that provides website developers with a simple, easy to use utility to allow building small-ish (dozens to hundreds of pages), semi-static websites. Typically our tool is used for corporate websites, or the website promoting a team or organization, etc. This is where we shine. There are other content management packages that specialize in building portals, or blogs, or article based content, etc. CMS Made Simple can do much of this, but it is not our area of focus.

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