Decoupled Content Management Systems

Decoupling your CMS means new opportunities for collaboration, but also new possibilities to scale, more flexibility in implementation and the chance to realize the dream of multi channel content authoring.

Decoupling Content Management

Traditional content management systems are monolithic beasts. Just to make your website editable you need to accept the web framework imposed by the system, the templating engine used by the system, and the editing tools used by the system. Want to have a better user interface? Be prepared to rewrite your whole website, and to the pain of having to migrate content between different storage systems.

But none of this should be necessary. When web editing tools were more immature, it made sense for the same people to build the whole stack from database content models to web page generation and editing tools. But that was ten years ago, now we could do better.

Here is how a traditional CMS looks like:

cms-monolithic-approach.png

As you can see, the whole system is a monolithic block. The CMS provides content storage, routing, templating, editing tools, the kitchen sink. Probably you’re even tied to a particular relational database for content storage. Want to use a cool new editor like Aloha, or a different templating engine, or maybe a trendy NoSQL storage back-end? You’ll have to convince the whole CMS project or vendor to switch over.

A much better picture would be something like the following:

cms-decoupled-approach.png

In this scenario, the concept of Content Management is decoupled. There is a content repository that manages content models and how to store them. This could be something like JCR, PHPCR, CouchDB or Midgard2. Then there is a web framework, responsible of matching URL requests to particular content and generating corresponding web pages. This could be Drupal, Neos, Django, CodeIgniter, Midgard MVC, or something similar. And finally there is the web editing tool. The web editing tool provides an interface for managing contents of the web pages. This includes features like rich text editing, workflows and image handling.

The web editing tools have traditionally been part of the web framework, the framework serving forms and toolbars to the user as part of the generated web pages. But with modern browsers you could throw forms out of the window and just make pages editable as they are.