CMS with Editable Region Classes

I have seen many Content Manageme开发者_Go百科nt Systems that allow users to define what is editable by defining "editable" in the class. I was basically wondering how this works with a CMS using PHP and MYSQL. I was thinking maybe Jquery scans the DOM for the specified class and places some code inside that div. Can someone point me in the right direction as I am wanting to upgrade my CMS to work with this method.

I think you already get it pretty much as it works. Hint some elements that can be edited inside the DOM, extend hinted elements with javascript to add the editing capabilities. Changes need to be fired with AJAX to the PHP backend which stores the changes into the DB. Next time the page is fully requested from server, those regions contain the data stored in the DB.