Web Content Management

Preface

Back in 1995 or so, I wrote my first HTML document.

I wrote it in Notepad on my 90 MHz Pentium tower from Gateway 2000. I still remember adding a TITLE tag, refreshing the page in Internet Explorer, and watching with awe as my document title filled the title bar of the browser window (the idea of tabbed browsers was still years in the future, so the document’s TITLE tag became the title of the entire window).

That first web page quickly grew into an entire website (the subject and point of which I honestly can’t remember—I suspect it was just a list of links to other sites). Mainstream adoption of CSS and JavaScript was still a few years off, so I didn’t have scripts or stylesheets, but I had a handful of HTML files and a bunch of images (you were nobody if you didn’t have a tiled, textured background on your page of links).

Quickly, I ran smack into the first problem of webmasters everywhere: how do I keep track of all this stuff? I don’t even think the word “content” had been popularly applied yet—it was all just “stuff.”

As websites inevitably grew, so did all the stuff. Since we were largely bound to the filesystem, we had copies of everything on our local computers that we would FTP to our servers. Huge problems resulted if you had more than one editor. With two people trying to manage files, they would inevitably get out of sync and changes would be unintentionally overwritten. Occasionally, you had to sync against the server by downloading everything and overwriting ...