The Xenei Content Management System (CMS) was designed with several critical design points:
Allow the people who have the knowledge (authors) the ability to author the documents.
Allow the people who design the web look and feel (webmasters) control over how documents are presented.
Make it easy for the author to verify the web content before it is published.
Make it easy for an editorial board (editors) to verify the accuracy of a document before making it visible on the web.
Do not tie the authors, webmasters, or editors to a specific platform.
To achieve these objectives we started with an office suite. For our purposes we selected OpenOffice since it runs on multiple platforms and support the WebDAV protocol. We also elected to use the internet to access both the document repository and content staging location.
XENEI.net provides fully configured content and staging servers and the connectivity to our customer's content servers. We can also provide content servers in a fully redundant managed facility.
The CMS source code is available available from our SourceForge hosted CVS servers.
Authors use OpenOffice to create or update documents that are used to generate web pages. The authors do not need to concern themselves with the look and feel of the documents, the fonts, sizes, colors, etc. The author opens and stores the documents on a “content server” using the WebDAV capabilities of OpenOffice. To the author this is just like saving the document to the local computer. After the document is complete, the author uses the CMS web application to generate content on a staging server. The author then reviews the staging content to ensure that the content is correct before turning the process over to an editor.
Editors use a web browser to verify the content of the new document. Editors may use OpenOffice to markup the document with proposed changes or use other means of communicating changes to the author. Once the document is approved the editor uses the web application to publish the staged site to the production servers.
Webmasters use cascading style sheets, XML transforms and other tools to set the web site look and feel. All documents are converted from OpenOffice format to XHTML format using standard transforms to create a standard look and feel. Once established, the transforms need not be modified unless there are new requirements to change the look and feel. The system provides a mechanism to regenerate the entire site should significant changes to look and feel processing occur.
The content development process uses three servers to create, verify and present content.
A Content server is a computer that stores the documents before they are processed and turned into web content. Generally, authors will write documents an store them on the “content server.” However, editors may also edit files on the content server. In addition to word processing documents the content server can store spread sheets, presentations, sound files, video files, pictures, and any other type of computer file. The content server is where the web site content is developed.
The “staging server” is where web site content is viewed and approved before it is moved to the “production server.” This is a computer like the content server. The major difference is that the files on the staging server are only placed there by the content management software (CMS). This is where the final checks for accuracy and look and feel are performed. If there is an editorial board that must approve content before it is made public this is where they will view the content and make their decision. Once the content is approved it is moved to the “production server.”
The production server is the computer where the “real” web site is hosted. This is the server that visitors to the web site actually see. All content on this server is only placed they via a process that copies from the staging server.