XML Content Management: Challenges and Solutions

E-commerce presupposes dynamic and personalized presentation of information. In order to support an effective e-commerce environment, content on the Internet must be flexible and reusable. These characteristics can be supported if content on the Internet is highly modularized and richly tagged. We propose to use XML as the framework upon which to build a web content management system that supports these features. However, the design of such a system, where content is highly modularized and reusable, creates new challenges that have to be addressed. These challenges include finding relevant information fragments on demand, keeping track of the dependencies between fragments, transforming combinations of those fragments into viewable pages available to multiple device types, and designing a content creation tool that does not overwhelm the contributor with the details and the complexities of the underlying system. In this paper we describe these challenges and the solutions that we developed in the design of a web content management system based on XML, code-named Franklin.