CMS theory/principles

How many different ways to make a CMS are there?

[fwordboy]

Hi, for a uni project I'm writing about and designing a CMS and comparing it against an open source CMS such as Mambo. As part of the write up I need to discuss content managment theories. Trouble is this completely baffles me, I've heard terms such as three-tier applications and object-oriented systems bandied about but don't really understand them.

Could someone point me in the direction of some Content Management theories? e.g How many different ways are there to make a CMS? Any help would be fantastic.

Once I know the different ways CMSs are created I can then searching and finding related papers/journals will be so much easier.

[Captaffy]

This isn't really going to be a very helpful reply, which is why I waited to see if you would actually receive a helpful one.

I've heard terms such as three-tier applications and object-oriented systems bandied about but don't really understand them.

These terms are probably just buzzwords. Meaningless for all intents and purposes. Is an object-oriented system really object-oriented in some way, or was it just written in an object-oriented language?

There are probably infinitely many ways to create a CMS. Some is glorified blogging software, some is obviously for publishing specific types of content (you can have a picture for the author, the author's name and then the article but nothing else!), and some costs thousands of dollars.

I was involved in setting up TeamSite within an organization, and this software costs a pretty large amount of money. Still, it couldn't do everything the organization wanted, so people had to be hired to add things and rewrite code, or if you wanted, Interwoven could create extensions for you for a fee.

Basically there are so many different things that people could want this software to do, that it's simply not possible to write a CMS that can do everything without it being very general. A good general one would just be easily extensible.

I don't know if there are any theories or papers in existence on this stuff to be honest. There should be, but it's a pretty young area and I think people are just flying by the seat of their pants.

[fwordboy]

thanks for the reply.

I think you might be right, my tutotr keeps telling me to go and find out about these theories as if they are in abundance but I can't for the life of me see past the facts that you've just laid out.

Searching google for papers there are lots of things written about CMSs involving mathematical formulas written by people who've never made a website in their lives (most probably) and nothing that actually relates to a real installation.

I guess I'll just write about what I know.