Integrating with Existing Content Management Systems

A wide variety of commercial CMS programs are available ”some standalone and some integrated into a larger e-business package. The way they work varies significantly from program to program. Although not all content management systems work with external authoring tools, those that do can benefit by integrating Dreamweaver into their workflow. Interwoven and Blue Martini ”both leading commercial CMS providers ”have implementations that integrate Dreamweaver. As you'll see in this chapter, Dreamweaver rises to the challenge gracefully.

To use an external editor, a CMS typically recognizes a proprietary set of markup tags, often, but not always, coded within a custom file type. Dreamweaver MX handles custom file types with ease and offers full support for third-party tags. You can enter custom tags directly into the code or visually in Design view in a number of ways, including drag-and-drop. After the custom tags are inserted, you can display them or hide them at will.