RE: Dynamic CMS Publishing?

Hi Peter,

> Does anyone out there have experience of using a publishing 
> model but publishing to dynamic (e.g. aspx, cfm, php, etc.) 
> files? For example, you have content personalization where 
> there are 3 articles on a page, but depending on user group 
> you may only see one or two. Rather than doing EVERYTHING 
> dynamically, you publish to a single simple script file but 
> you publish switching logic that checks for session variables 
> and you may include personalization tokens so you can have a 
> Hello %FirstName% even though the site is published.

This is possible in a number of systems. If you like CFML, then CommonSpot,
in the 4.0 version, offers publishing of both static and dynamic content.
That feature is geared towards entire pages being static or dynamic. However
you can also publish "static" files out of CommonSpot with various file
extensions (eg, .jsp, .asp, etc.) and thus embed hooks in the
cms-static-content, interacting with other scripts, controls, objects, etc.
..or embedding logic themselves.

If you are a .NET fan, you can publish out of MCMS with ASP.NET backend
templates. The ASPX files have numerous options for output caching at the
page and/or component level, storing data client-side, server-side, or
"downstream". This output caching can additionally be parameter based (if
not client-side), varying on query string parameters, HTTP headers, and/or
custom parameters (such as a user group ID). With this approach, the content
is not static strictly speaking, but you can achieve near the same result by
leveraging a combination of .NET and MCMS native caching capabilities. It is
also quite simple to implement and customize this approach.

For example, we just implemented a set of intelligent MCMS templates that
allowed the authors to select the level of caching they wished to support on
a page by page basis. There are many possibilities there.

I'm sure there are many other ways to skin this cat, these are just a couple
of options.

> I'd be interested to know how widespread this is. I'm doing 
> it in my new CMS to get balance between performance and 
> personalization, but would like to get an idea of how others 
> have implemented similar systems.

This is a very wide spread need. That's why the feature is prevalent in a
number of platforms, both CMS and App Server.

> Also, if anyone has gone this route, do you have any 
> experience of form handling on published sites where you want 
> to use the back end CMS for form handling? I guess the 
> obvious way is for the published site to just use the form 
> action to call the CMS site that would run validation, save 
> to db and create any workflow tasks/notifications before 
> either displaying the thanks page or redirecting back to the 
> thanks (or error) page on the published CMS. 

Having the CMS handle forms tends to be a feature/product specific
functionality. Since arguably form processing is not content management
(many will debate this) and some CMS systems are not necessarily involved in
delivery, not all products handle it. 

CommonSpot does have built in forms processing and forms designing (Simple
Forms & Data Sheets module). I'm sure other web-oriented CMS products also
offer this functionality, and I'm sure you'll here more about it here :).

Best regards,
Brice
---
Brice Dunwoodie
Cylogy, Inc.
bdunwood-/[email protected]
http://www.cylogy.com


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