Summary of the ZMS concept

»Internet nowadays is at a point where search engines significantly decide on a website´s success. ZMS technologically is best prepared to effect optimum search engine rankings. We appreciate the innovative and inspiring atmosphere of this CMS project.«
Richard Bendit, Webpromotion-Consultant

The basic idea of ZMS is to make available a simple tool which enables to transfer easily the basics of web publishing and which is bare of any feature ballast of the usual software packages for content management. ZMS offers a basic model, resulting out of the experience of the construction of websites consisting of several ten thousand pages.
The underlying principles clearly prefer the homogeneity of the page structure, the hierarchic building of the website and the maintenance of the contents to the design of individual sites! An important ZMS principle is the strict separation of content, layout and design: layout and design such as the associated logic are maintained in so-called templates (special ZOPE objects outside ZMS). The main function of ZMS is to transfer the content into a maintainable form and to facilitate as far as possible the procedure of the maintenance.

Importance of content management

The number of documents being provided for the internet publishing increases extremely fast and therefore also the effort for the administration of these documents.

In the past three years the subject content management and the connected subjects (document management, knowledge management) has expanded to a strategic development factor and constitutes together with the connected software products and services an important market.
At the beginning of the construction of an internet presentation, a manageable number of documents is usually concerned in the view of the user, decorated with individual design and structure by agencies and is mostly conform to special demands. Usual software tools for the construction of internet documents are for example Frontpage, Net Objects or Dreamweaver. As long as the internet presentations consist of small sites which is a "web visiting card" of 5 to 20 pages with a great deal of design, the application of such flexible design tools is absolutely justified.
The disadvantage of such tools is that they don‘t instruct the user to employ homogeneous document models and also don‘t coordinate sufficiently the cooperation of many editors. Furthermore the administration is hardly effective from a certain document quantity on but there are solutions required which base on databases.
The advantage of content management or web publishing solutions is especially shown whenever revisions of the website are to be made for there very high costs and a great deal of time can possibly arise. With the help of a well structured website the expenditure of restructure and redesign stays within limits; this regards especially:

• Design modification
• Content restructuring
• Change to another system
• Simultaneous publishing in different systems
• Integration of foreign contents

But also in the daily work the advantages of an efficient system are clearly remarked:

• Automatic updating of the navigation
• In the work with templates (design models) design modifications have consequences on the whole site, without having the difficulties to modify the single documents.
• Uniform look of the documents
• Link consistency (reference help within the website)
• Coordination of responsibilities through gradual document release (workflow mechanism)