Deployment of CMS Driven Content

I'm researching changing my current strategy for creating marketing websites. Currently, I build sites entirely from scratch in PHP, using a simple system of includes. All code (and therefore content) is stored in the files (rather than a database) allowing me to use Subversion for history and deployment.

I'd like to move to using a CMS for sites, but I don't know how do deal with large sets of content changes and deployment.

Most of the time changes in marketing sites are not simple. A product launch could involve changing, adding, deleting and moving around of many pages at once. All these changes need to be made and reviewed on a staging server. And when everything is ready, it needs to go into production, all at once, at a specific time.

Most CMS's solution to workflow is to allow single page review, by an editor, from within the CMS. And most of the time, they are reviewing a page that is yet to be published, rather than changes to a page that is already there. On top of that, this review is done on the production site. This is geared more towards periodic article creation, like blogging. Marketing sites do have news sections, but this doesn't help in launching the entire "Brand New Thing" product section.

I can't seem to find a CMS solution for my workflow:

• Create content in a development environment.
• Deploy all changes to a staging server for review by all parties involved (without having to find a click some "preview" button within the CMS).
• Deploy all approved 开发者_运维知识库changes at a specified time.
• Allow for tweaks to content through the CMS

Credibility: I lead the team that builds a rather large CMS* and we have a lot of the same demands you describe. For example, editors needing to create a hundred pages of marketing material, images, movies; translate that into 65 languages and deploy it all at the same time worldwide.

How to approach it? There's plenty of approaches, and the one you're suggesting has its own set of difficulties. The model we've found works quite well is the single-page-review model combined with batch scheduling. Most content management systems allow editors to create pages but check-in as "Draft" rather than "Publish". To a non-logged-in user, that page will return a 404, but to a logged-in user, they will see the latest draft version. Once an approver has validated all the content, they can schedule all n pages to be published at the same time. This does indeed scale up and out quite well.

I can't recommend a specific solution without knowing more about your unique problem set, but I encourage you not to lock yourself in to a specific system model this early in the process. Based on what you've said, most good CMS systems should be viable candidates with a small amount of customization.

^{*Nearly a million pages, over 65 languages, thousands of editors, millions of hits a day - http://www.volvo.com}