Integrating with Content Management Systems

A content management system (CMS) is just another software application. Fortunately, you don't have to write it; just install and use it, which for some of the early CMSs was just as difficult as writing one from scratch! Content comes in two basic flavors: files and discrete items/values. File content includes images, documents, media files, and so on. There isn't much integrated in the design. The deployment of this type of content needs to be managed well, and this can be a difficult problem when the content needs to be distributed to multiple servers at the same time, but that's one of the reasons you buy a good content management solution instead of building your own.

When the content is in the form of discrete items, such as text fragments, there are two ways to incorporate it in Web application pages. CMS APIs can be called to get the content values each time the dynamic Web page is being processed. For content that changes hourly or daily, this is the most appropriate option. When the content changes annually, the overhead of calling potentially expensive CMS API functions for each user page request is not appropriate, and an alternative form of integrating content should be used. Most CMS systems provide a mechanism for Web page generation. If the CMS can generate ASPX or JSP pages with embedded content, these pages can be deployed just like file content whenever their values change.