Problems With Traditional Content Management Solutions

Almost all good content management solutions provide the following to their users:

• Role based security
• Inline content editing
• Expansive developer API
• Comprehensive management software

However, they don't address certain issues which will eventually come to pass as organizations grow. The most specific of these issues is multilingual management of content - or managing content translations inside of content management. Many content management solutions, such as Microsoft CMS 2002 suggest maintaining a separate Channel per language, so that your navigation and language switching can reference in the fashion http://www.yourcompany.com/german/index.htm. There are several problems which arise from this scenario.

The largest of these problems is that the core web site doubles in size every time a new language is introduced. Maintaining a separate Channel per language means maintaining a completely new set of Postings per language. A web site with one hundred Postings that exists in a single language must be completely copied when a new language exists - so the web site in a single language consists of one hundred Postings, and the same site in two languages now becomes two hundred Postings. The management requirement doubles, as does the sheer size of your web site.

Many web sites must be translated into more than two languages. What you eventually have is a web site that is n times the size of the original site (where n is the number of required languages). As the number n grows (as does the company's international support requirements) the web site grows more and more uncontrollable, and management requirements skyrocket - which was, of course, the original reason that the content management solution was purchased in the first place.

So what's to be done?  Read on...