Technologies

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Database driven web sites, dynamic web sites, template driven web sites, etc are part of the movement from static content to easy to manage, more interesting websites.

Initially, at the birth of the Internet, websites were very unique and interesting. But that didn't last very long. That static content quickly gave way to dynamic content in a number of forms. It was content that could change based on various parameters. The use of the text file, tables and relational database, coupled with a server side scripting language brought a new day to the delivery of content over the Internet. The e-commerce shopping cart is a classic example of the use of these techniques. Other websites such as newspapers, etc. have leveraged this concept as well.

Today, dynamic web sites are fairly common. As the content of a website grows, the effort to create and maintain a website diminishes dramatically using dynamic content.

The next step was to put a layer of templates between the content and the engine that created and delivered the page to the browser. Many applications such as Joomla, Drupal, etc. have addressed this concept, some, very well.