Development of Content Management System-based Web Applications

Abstract

Web engineering is the application of systematic and quantifiable approaches (concepts, methods, techniques, tools) to cost-effective requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, operation, and maintenance of high quality web applications. Over the past years, Content Management Systems (CMS) have emerged as an important foundation for the web engineering process. CMS can be defined as a tool for the creation, editing and management of web information in an integral way. A CMS appears to be of value since it provides a standardized platform for web development with a set of functionalities that allow users (or business owners of the website) to manage the website without the need for technical knowledge. However, developing CMS-based web applications can be complex to implement because of the dual lifecycle of CMS-implementations, matching requirements with software product capabilities, customizations to meet end-user requirements and maintenance processes once the application has been implemented. To overcome the numerous implementation failures, our research is focused on the web engineering process for the development of CMS-based web applications. The hypothesis on which my research is based is that this can be solved by providing methodical support to organizations in the form of an integrated development and an implementation model that provides the activities and deliverables to guide the development of CMS-based web applications. We propose the Web Engineering Method (WEM) as a situational development method for web engineering process of high quality CMS-based web applications. We use the situational method-engineering approach to gather relevant method fragments from several web engineering methods and combined them into WEM. We also explored two methods to innovate WEM: the concepts of Model Driven web engineering with the purpose of improving the realization process by automating the configuration of the CMS, and the concepts of product verticalization where we identified commonalities in implementations of CMS-based web applications and provide a method for the improvement of WEM. The main contribution is a detailed overview of WEM: the implementation process of CMS-based web applications. There are many publications in the fields of web engineering, but a complete description on how to cope with a CMS, as a foundation for web applications does not exist. The process descriptions tell the scientific community how we combined existing methods and created a new method using a situational method engineering approach. We provide an overview of key concepts of CMS that we take into account during the process description. We also present a number of improvements for developing CMS-based web applications based on a model driven approach and in the dual lifecycle of content management systems. These contributions provide organizations that implement a CMS with guidelines and best practices, which allow them to improve the overall quality of the CMS-based web application. Simultaneously, software developers creating CMS can improve the software product and the way it is implemented using a model-driven approach or product-verticalization. Organizations looking for a CMS-based web application have a detailed process overview of all the steps involved, best practices, potential pitfalls and suggestions for improvement