DrupalCon Munich 2012: Decoupling Content Management

The current breed of Content Management Systems is largely monolithic: if you're choosing a system based on its user experience, this will mandate the web development tools and languages to use, and often even the database where your content is persisted. Or if you choose it based on the web development tools, this will mandate the user interface and storage layers.

But now a new movement has started towards a more decoupled CMS landscape. Projects like Create and PHPCR spearhead it, giving CMS developers previously-unseen opportunities for cross-project collaboration.

Create is the next generation user interface for content management. Itprovides a fully client-side content editing experience built on tools and standards like RDFa and Backbone.js. With Create, end users can stop filling forms and start communicating with their audience.

The MIT-licensed Create library provides CMS developers with a set of widgets to easily build a modern user experience. It has been built as part of the EU-funded Interactive Knowledge Systems project, which aims to boost the state of Open Source Content Management by new tools built on semantic technologies.

PHPCR is the PHP port of the Java Content Repository standard, giving a flexible way for CMS developers to define their content model, to work with content trees and query and manage data. The PHPCR initiative initially started from the Typo3 project, but has since gathered many other participants. There are several standards-compliant PHPCR implementations out there, allowing developers to persist content and transport it between storage layers like Apache Jackrabbit, Midgard2, and MongoDB.

This talk will explain how both Create and PHPCR work, and how they can be utilized in CMS development. It also shows how systems like Midgard, OpenCMS, and Symfony CMF already use the building blocks of Decoupled Content Management.

You can find out more about Create on http://createjs.org, PHPCR on http://phpcr.github.com/. The concept of Decoupled Content Management is described on http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/decoupling_content_management/.

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