CMS and AJAX

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, June 21, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Back in April, CMS Watch published an article entitled Ajax and Your CMS. The article looks at the impact of AJAX on CMS systems from both the content author's and the site visitors perspective. From the author's perspective, the news is all good and pretty conventional as far as AJAX articles go: fewer click, drag-and-drop, faster, more powerful UI. There are a few noteworthy points to the article, however. For one, content management with AJAX enabled, single-page sites puts a premium on managing assets:

If you are going to use a heavily-Ajax-driven interface on your websites, then it is worth considering a CMS to manage intra-page snippets and interaction as discrete elements. In practice it could be difficult to manage a rich, interactive site that uses single page interfaces without a CMS, since at this point you are managing content components rather than entire "pages." The whole notion of "pages" tends to dissipate, which would call for a more component-oriented -- rather than page-oriented -- CMS for those looking to manage Ajax-driven websites.

So, if you're publishing content rather than constructing an application, then composing a bunch of widgets together using a CMS sounds plausible. However,

Web CMS tools are notoriously poor at managing stylesheet elements and client-side scripting in particular. The rise of Ajax should prompt some improvements here.

Improve or die, I guess.

The few bad patches for the content author are things that people are already working on: back button, refresh/reload an state, etc. Previewing content from a single page interface is a problem not just restricted to CMS's. You can identify the "states" within the single page interface and preview those, i.e. "show me the state after a restaurant has been picked."

That's It?

The fact that CMS Watch really struggled to find much more to say about AJAX than "will make it easier to use, may make content harder to manage," I think points out that nobody really has a clue about how to effectively use AJAX for content sites. All of the major AJAX enabled sites these days seem to be collaborative filtering excercises like digg and dzone. There must be better ways than this to apply this nifty technology.

I think we can come up with a few ideas. What are some of the content display issues we can tackle with AJAX? Let me give three off the top of my head:

• Screen real estate - we can summarize an article and expand the full test into a new reading context when the user navigates to it. I have a primitive little example here. Just click on one of the text boxes to read the full article in place.
• Breadcrumbs on steroids - this is more about providing a better reading metaphor. We can make the sections of the paper fold and unfold, allow the reader to rapidly navigate through tabs or trees. No more slow postback means we can try more stuff.
• Contextual control - the WSJ already has the capability to right click on a selected word and perform a search. But contextual search, navigation, and other operations are the next step. Imagine an online newspaper where a reader can right click in an article about their neighborhood and get restaurant review listings for nearby establishments. You no longer have to cram every single relevant thing into the sidebars!

The day is still young on CMS and AJAX. Think outside the box and share your own thoughts on what AJAX can do for CMS.

agile ajax

Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   I think Ajax will all the user more control - rather than let the admin decide where page content should go, the user should be allowed to chop and change as it suits them. A good example of this is Netvibes http://www.netvibes.com/

   Netvibes reinforces your point that future web layouts will be constructed from components, rather than pages in the classic sense.

   Comment by Rob Lang, Monday, June 26, 2006 @ 4:00 am

2. 

   thank you

   Comment by oyunlar, Saturday, November 17, 2007 @ 2:27 pm

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