There are three major types of WCMS: offline processing, online processing, and hybrid systems. These terms describe the deployment pattern for the WCMS in terms of when presentation templates are applied to render Web pages from structured content.

Offline processing

• These systems pre-process all content, applying templates before publication to generate Web pages. Vignette CMS and Bricolage are examples of this type of system. Since pre-processing systems do not require a server to apply the templates at request time, they may also exist purely as design-time tools; Adobe Contribute is an example of this approach.

Online processing

• These systems apply templates on-demand. HTML may be generated when a user visits the page, or pulled from a cache. Hosted CMSs are provided by such SaaS developers as AspireCMS, Bravenet, UcoZ, Freewebs and Crownpeak.
• Some of the better known open source systems that produce pages on demand include Concrete5, Mambo, Joomla!, Drupal, TYPO3, Zikula and Plone, etc…
• DotNetNuke is a partially open source CMS that runs on asp.net and is free to download and install. DNN produces pages on demand but levels and types of caching can be set. There are also many additional "modules" that can be purchased or installed for free to extend the functionality of DNN as needed, many of which create data and content dynamically.
• Most Web application frameworks perform template processing in this way, but they do not necessarily incorporate content management features. Wikis, e.g. MediaWiki and TWiki generally follow an online model (with varying degrees of caching), but generally do not provide document workflow.

Hybrid Systems

• Some systems combine the offline and online approaches. Some systems write out executable code (e.g. JSP, ASP, PHP,ColdFusion,Perl pages) rather than just static HTML, so that the CMS itself does not need to be deployed on every Web server. Other hybrids, such as Blosxom, are capable of operating in either an online or offline mode.

A WCMS is a software system used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A CMS facilitates document control, auditing, editing, and timeline management. A WCMS provides the following key features:

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Web Content Management Systems began to be formally developed as a commercial software products in the mid nineties. In the mid 2000s, the web content management market became a fragmented market as a plethora of new providers emerged to complement the traditional vendors. These Web Content Management systems are typically broken down into several groups:

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