What is a Content Management Platform?

When it comes to Content Management a lot of terms are in the wild. CMS, CMF, CMP… What else could you imagine? We see Sulu more as a “Content Management Platform” as it isn’t made for websites only and we want to keep it highly customizable.

A “Content Management Platform” is a set of components and modules that can be used to build a content administration and publishing environment customized to the individual needs of the project. It’s used for data driven systems, web-apps or large scale web platforms. A “Content Management System” (CMS) is a more or less standardized software with a fixed set of functionalities mainly focused on the management of websites.

Sulu is a Content Management Platform which comes with all necessary modules to be used as a CMS. In this documentation we will focus mainly on the usage as a Content Management System.

Sulu is capable of managing the content of websites and fully support the 4-step “Content Life Cycle” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_lifecycle):

  1. Content creation/collection
  2. Revision/approval
  3. Publishing
  4. Archiving

The standard publishing format is HTML but the platform is multi-channel, meaning other formats (such as e.g. XML) can be easily applied. Other strengths are the support of multi-languages and multi-site structures with shareable content.

Sulu was designed to create webpages with high performance in the current state of the Internet. This means a high focus on web standards (as described in the W3C standards http://www.w3.org/standards/) and search engine optimization.

Although Sulu focuses on more complex websites it still provides an UI that is easy to understand, fast to learn and enjoyable to use. The software runs on modern browsers without the need of any plugins and will work on a standard state-of-the-art PC or tablet.

We already covered some of Sulu’s strength. The next chapter will stake out the main focus.