Section E.5. Content Management System Toolkits and Components

E.5. Content Management System Toolkits and Components

Often an enterprise wants to offer a content management system to a collection of internal users or customers, and none of the solutions available is a good fit for the requirements. In this scenario, it makes sense to go with a content management system that comes with a toolkit to extend and modify its functionality. By definition, all open source content management systems are toolkits, but some are designed better than others when it comes to being extensible. When evaluating candidates in this area, one should focus on code base quality (a well-defined API and good documentation), and the availability of the components in all major areas of a content management system (content creation, publishing, versioning, and workflows). All the projects we have recommended are good candidates for use as toolkits.

Content management system toolkits can be used to build custom content management systems that fit requirements developed internally. They help accelerate the progress of development by providing preexisting components and a functional API that allows developers to work on high-level concepts, such as workflow and site design, instead of inventing templating from scratch.

E.5.1. Apache AxKit

Apache AxKit is a content management system and XML application server that builds dynamic web sites. AxKit is built on top of mod_Perl and it uses XML and XSLT very effectively.

E.5.1.1 Product strengths

• It has a flexible pipeline of components, and it is easy to replace any component with a custom one.

• It offers full separation of content and presentation.

E.5.1.2 Product weakness

• It has a steep learning curve.