DB Prism / Cocoon - Content Management System (also Thoughts on a data-driven web site)

["Marcelo F. Ochoa" <mo...@ieee.org>]

Hi all:
   Robert Hall (rhall@us.oracle.com) of Oracle Corporation said:
"To help Oracle cut $1 billion in costs, developers at oracle.com, Oracle's main customer-facing web site, are consolidating content from more than 40 regional Web sites. As a result, oracle.com tripled in size to more than 24,000 Web pages (60,000 files) between November 1999 and February 2000. "
 This motivated me to make a CMS system based on DB Prism / Cocoon.
Compared to a file system, a database-backed CMS offers Web site developers and users several benefits, including: 
* Concurrency management and version control. In a simple flat-file system, two or more people can edit the same asset at the same time, but only one person's changes will survive. In contrast, the CMS stores assets in tables structured to support multiple versions, and the database manages concurrent access.
* A consistent yet customizable look and feel throughout the site. The CMS builds template-based Web pages by pulling standardized design elements and navigation items from the database. Site-wide changes can be made quickly and easily by editing these assets and re-applying templates: by changing one asset (an icon, for example) in the CMS, a person can effectively update every page in the site. With multiple templates in the database, it's also easy to localize the site or to format content for various devices (such as handheld computers or cellular phones) simply by applying the appropriate template.
* Access control. As described above, changes to certain assets can affect the entire site. Imagine a frustrated copywriter editing the Legal department's Privacy notice, or a well-intentioned art lover reworking the corporate logo. To keep people from doing things they shouldn't, the CMS grants access privileges at various levels based on user roles.
* Fast, effective searches. Oracle8i includes interMedia, which can index text in the database to provide superior search performance. 
 After 15 days of work (including code, design and content data) the