XML Content Management System

XML Database

Traditionally, content management systems have a relational database for data storage.

Figure 1. Classic CMS Architecture with RDBMS for Data Storage.

With an XML Content management system, the most sensible data store is an XML DBMS. (shown in Figure 2).

Figure 2. CMS Architecture using XML DBMS for Data Storage.

Relational systems are very poor at storing each of the information items of document-centric data and typically store entire documents as one blob of data making sub-items in the document unavailable to the DBMS. This blob treatment of XML makes it impossible to optimally and flexibly perform full text searches without additional software. As well, with a blob layout, it is not possible to do queries that generate content derived from the documents in the database, derived content such as a table of contents, lists of titles, lists of abstracts or other manipulations of the content. On the other hand, an XML DBMS stores and retrieves XML Documents as fully accessible trees of information items. An XML DBMS will most likely comply with the XML Query Standard, XQuery which allows you to query any item within a document or combine items from multiple documents. As well, an XML DBMS supports security, scheduled backups, transactions, recovery, binary storage, as well as other expected DBMS features. A more extensive discussion of the native XML DBMS is in Chapter 8 of XQuery From the Experts.

XSLT

XSLT plays a large role in transforming the stored XML into a published form, especially when the published form is different from the stored form. By "stored form" we mean the form or vocabulary you have chosen for your XML content. XSLT is especially useful for transforming stored XML into XHTML or HTML. For instance, if your stored XML vocabulary is DITA or Open Document, then you can use XSLT to get an XHTML form for the purpose of displaying in any browser. In fact, the DITA toolkit includes the transformations from DITA to HTML and from DITA to PDF. A very common print format is PDF since Adobe has free printer rendering support for PDF as well as a free browser plugin for viewing PDF. To get to a page based layout like PDF, publishers often use the XML format called formatted objects (part 2 of the XSL specification). This allows XSLT and thus XML technologies to be used for the lion's share of the transformation with the final formatted objects to PDF step being a simpler.

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