This final-year project will be a record of the experiences, approaches, lessons and conclusions arising from the creation of a CMS’s core architecture.
The aim is to develop an application with a back end for managing its front end. Its component-oriented structure will support team development.
The back end must be robust, reliable and scalable; its weight is less important. Component orientation means that, once the core has been established, any developer can add components through a clearly defined interface.
The front end, by contrast, must be simple and, above all, very lightweight, because it bears the greatest server load. It will also be module-oriented: pages are formed by combining modules.
The concept of a page will be explored in depth. A drag-and-drop system will allow pages to be created in the back end by placing dynamic, static or custom modules onto them.
The web server’s output buffers will be used to implement an on-demand caching system based on the file system, storing rendered output as flat files. The aim is to demonstrate that this kind of system can improve performance without substantially increasing complexity or harming the user experience.
