Tim's Blog
Web Services for Content Management Systems
8/19/2007 - Tim Laubacher
Neither web services nor content management systems are new technologies. But the use of web services in content management systems is not as widespread as I think it should be.
Web services make it easier to share information and system functionality. Although we use web services quite extensively our customers and their vendors rarely take advantage of the benefits of web services to ease business processes. Take for example our customer, Custom Impressions, Inc., a leading promotional products company with an e-business arm. Custom Impression's website, www.ImpressYou.com , has thousands of products from dozens of vendors, but only one vendor supplies their product information through web services. This made automating product imports very difficult and time consuming.
Web services would serve both the vendors and their distributors as it would make it easier for the distributors to display accurate and timely product data. In fact if the vendor exposed a web service of their catalog they could themselves have a more dynamic and useful website.
Now when it comes to content management systems, a web services architecture opens all kinds of possibilities. Popular content management systems, such as Joomla ( www.joomla.org ), claim to be flexible and customizable. But they fall short at becoming a truly flexible content management system because the customizations you can make do not benefit other potential users of the content.
The MyWebDept.com Web Services Based Content Management System offers more flexibility in terms of sharing content on the web. Users of the system can expose their content through the MyWebDept.com web services. Whether it be menus, page content, contact forms, blogs, calendars, or any one of MyWebDept.com's many components, content can be shared and even edited from any other web site or web application that is configured to consume the web services.
It won't be long before other content management systems begin to take advantage of web services to allow users to share content with other web sites and applications. The combination of web services and content management just makes too much sense.