CMF Dogbowl: Introduction to CMF

By paul [ http://cmf.zope.org/PTK/Members/paul ]

March 1, 2001

Web sites today have become sophisticated, dynamic experiences full of powerful services. At the same time, businesses want powerful new ways to leverage brand and engage customers, usually on a very large scale. Yet with the explosion of content on websites, managing the daily flow has become a very expensive, brittle proposition.

This is the market that content management systems (CMS) are ideal for. The Content Management Framework (CMF) from Digital Creations is designed to solve these content management issues by delivering the following benefits:

Superior speed to market for applications and content.
Dramatically decrease website staff workload by safe delegation of content authoring.
Powerful searches using sophisticated organization of content.

This guide introduces users to the CMF, showing them the kinds of uses for which it is suited.

Introduction

The CMF is designed as a framework of components for the Zope application server. This approach to content management delivers a number of benefits over other solutions:

Fast time to market
Both buy and build.
Reinventing content. All three tiers, multiple delivery,
Faster ROI.
More power for more people.
Semantic web.
Enforcement of content and business rules.
Structured content.

The content services in the framework include:

MembershipServices, including personalization
CatalogingServices
WorkflowServices
BasicContentServices
SiteDesignServices
IntegrationServices
DiscussionServices
ArchivingServices
SyndicationServices
RatingServices
TestingServices

From Zope, the CMF inherits a series of benefits:

Security
All three tiers as managed content
Web management and authoring
Clustering

The core set of frameworks in the CMF are Open Source, as is the Zope application server. Additionally, Digital Creations offers other value-added frameworks as part of its consulting services:

Project management
Help desk
Acceleration
Usage tracking