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Before I started working on Tridion projects, almost nobody in my DC was aware of Tridion CMS. When we got a project from one of our client, we didn’t want to miss that opportunity. So we had to arrange a professional training from SDL Tridion. Those two weeks sessions was good enough to get started on our project.

Now I’m on the verge of signing another Tridion project and also we are expecting few more opportunities. We realized that its good time to train others and, of course its always good to have additional hands. So we randomly selected 10 peoples from a bunch of .Net developers and discussed with them on their interest in learning Tridion. When everything was set, we prepared a schedule for two weeks. Theories in the first week, 2 hours daily, and lab sessions in the second week.

This is our second week so team is fully involved in doing lab exercises. I can say that people are more interested in learning Tridion than we thought. Good to know that bunch of Tridion developers are coming out. Now its all rely on getting into right projects

Since we are concentrating primarily on technical front, we focused only on core topics.

This schedule was based on SDL Tridion 2009 and we are trying to setup a lab on Tridion 2011, which would definitely need another week session

I was quite away from ASP.Net development for more than 2 years that means when I was introduced to ASP.Net MVC framework. After that I moved to MOSS and Tridion development. Now I might get an opportunity, in a couple of months, on ASP.Net. I’m sure that I need to learn lot from newer version of .Net frameworks, esp ASP.Net MVP framework 3.

So thinking of starting with ASP.Net MVC framework.

I think I can start with MSDN which has complete set for beginners

Content Management Systems - allows more people to contribute contents and manages web site without having to deal with the technical aspects of web design.

Generally CMS is classified as ECMS & WCMS.

1. Enterprise content management systems - manage the content/documents related to the organization.
2. Web content management systems - manage and publish the content to website or mobile devices.

I’ve not worked much on enterprise content management systems. So I’m listing the details of only WCMS.

Web Content Management System

• Presentation layer displays the content based on templates.
• Provides browser-based interfaces
• Even non-technical users can manage contents

Capabilities

• Automated templates
• Easily editable content
• Workflow management
• Content Targeting
• Document management
• Content syndication
• Multilingual
• Scalable feature sets

Advantages

• Database driven
• Separate design and content.
• Use CSS to control site
  appearance
• Access from anywhere
• Web site management panel
• Schedule content updates
• HTML knowledge not required
• Create automatic RSS Feeds.

Disadvantages

• Storage Volume
• Limited flexibility in design
• Limited SEO of web pages
• Performance Issues
• Maintenance costs

All these details are taken from various web links.

My colleage adviced me to get better understanding about the content lifecycle if we want to become CMS professional. To be honest, I’ve been searching some materials about all phases but finally I end up with not much clarity. So many people are suggesting variuos phases.

Finally I understand all are pointing similar things but categoried into granular levels. As I’m working in Tridion project, I could compare each phases with their definitions and I agreed with following 7 phases.

Content lifecycle

1. Organization
2. Creation
3. Storage
4. Workflow
5. Versioning
6. Publishing
7. Archives

I didn’t detail each phase as I don’t know to elaborate these things . Please refer CMS Seven Stages to know more details.

Here are other references for better understanding…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_lifecycle

http://johnnyholland.org/2010/10/14/content-lifecycle-closing-the-loop-in-content-strategy/

http://intentionaldesign.ca/2010/04/15/content-lifecycle/

After 6 years into core .Net & Sharepoint development, I’ve moved to content management stream. Currently learning SDL Tridion for my current assignment. But I still consider myself as a .Net developer and trying to be a better programmer. Same time, I don’t want to lose focus from my current assignments. But what made me really worried was leaving .Net as 90% content management systems are based on JAVA. Luckily my current content management system is SDL Tridion which is .Net based.

Before getting into Tridion, thinking of posting few articles on CMS & WCMS. Hope this will help to get basics of content management and its classifications. Let’s call it WCM series

Suggestions/Corrections are welcome…