Inside Mercury 80 Web Content Management System

The Technology

You may have used web page development tools such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver.  You've probably heard of web application platforms like Visual Studio, SunONE, and ColdFusion.  These tools all have one thing in common.  They save your finished work in flat files.

The biggest difference between Mercury 80 and most other web development tools is in the way it stores your content.  Your website content, design, and application logic are stored in separate containers within a database.

There is a tremendous benifit to storing web content in a database instead of flat files which I will soon explain.  But first, let's take a look at how databases are useful in other fields.

Databases enable separate but related information to be stored and queried.  Let's take a customer list and a product list for example.  After you enter your customers and products into a database, they can be logically associated with each other; the database can tell you which customers purchased which products, and which products attract the most customers.  Simply by creating database relationships between those two lists, the system has become more powerful than it could be if the two lists were stored in separate.

I decided to look at web pages in a way akin to database systems:  Pages could be thought of as containers of content, and therefore a database can be created that associates content with web pages.

Using this architecture, you can insert text and images into an orderly list of content items on a web page.  Mercury 80 provides a very simple interface to this architecture.  Results: Content can easily be added or updated with an interface where you click on the content, edit, and save and go live with new content instantly.

Just as we can use databases to manage data relationships that associate your customers with your products, Mercury 80 uses databases to manage relationships between elements of your site such as pages, content, and design elements.

So does this philosophy work?  The applications that Mercury 80 can produce are the real measurement of its success.  In just minutes Mercury 80 can create pages that let anybody add, edit, or modify any kind of data you can imagine.

See Also:
Case Study: Mercury 80 powers arcoexpress.com
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