Byrne Tony Byrne

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Putting a CMS Behind Your Existing Website

29-Jul-2005

Tags: Web Content and Experience Management, CM System, CMS, SR2

Which came first, your CMS or your website? Probably the latter. But if your website employs a lot of dynamic logic, how do you preserve that investment while backing it with a CMS? Although not suitable for all use cases, one approach is to completely decouple your CMS and delivery environments. Percussion has aggressively advocated this approach and Refresh Software has simplified it to an extreme by handing off a populated database to your web tier. Conversely, Ektron has a bundled CMS and delivery architecture, but the company recently announced that its CMS400.NET product supports multiple scripting languages, including PHP, JSP, and ColdFusion for content delivery. Note that CMS400 still serves the content at run-time, and you must modify your existing scripts to access Ektron-managed items. Here's some sample PHP code for retrieving a specific list index from the respository: <?PHP ecmListSummary ("MarketingNews",0,1,"", "Title,asc", "DateModified",0,"",""); ?>, taken from Ektron's public documentation (pdf).

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