Although you won't necessarily have control over the first factor, these principles can and should be applied to any software project. Ensure that you put enough consideration into the earliest stages of your project, the specifications and the design of the architecture. Your project will have a much greater chance of succeeding.

Next time: publishing to HTML
There is a downside to many modern content management systems: performance.

The more features you add, and the more dynamic the page construction process is, the heavier the load is upon the content management system server(s). This is a particular issue with content management system that uses XML. Handling XML data is costly in terms of system resources. XML data tends to be large in size, and the overhead of parsing is time consuming and expensive in terms of processor cycles. Many modern content management systems use XML at their core.

Dynamic page building performance isn't such a problem if you're running a site that doesn't get too much traffic, or if you can afford top end servers. If, however, you're running a large site, then you need maximum performance. You can't afford to have your servers chugging along constructing dynamic pages over and over.

There's a great solution to this problem, which is to suck the entire site down into pure HTML format and then publish only these static HTML pages. You then get the benefit of your powerful dynamic page building system as well as the super high performance delivered when serving only pure HTML.

Next time I'll tell you about a great product that I found that does exactly this and does it better than anything else out there. Oh, and it's free too.

Well that's it folks. I wanted to give you an insight into the workings of a powerful and full featured content management system, and that's what we've done. Drop me an email if you've got any questions.

Looking for work
I've just finished a contract, so if you need any contract Domino development done, drop me an email at astuart@mira.net.