You can often see many people on Baidu explaining the development of website group technology, and dividing it into four generations, five generations, and six generations. Here, we will take the sixth generation as an example. Their so-called six generations are roughly the natural website group, the unified planning website group, the use of third parties to realize information sharing website group, the content management system, the dynamic content management system and the sub-site independent storage website group.
Regarding the above statement of six generations, I would like to express my personal opinion.
Currently, there are probably a few companies in the industry that are relatively successful in building website groups, such as TRS, Western Dynamics, Dahan, Sujian, and Kaipu Internet. If you carefully study the products of these companies, you will find that standing on the website From the perspective of network development, in terms of different development technologies, there are only two generations of website group technology, namely the first-generation website group technology (Web1.0) and the second-generation website group technology (Web2.0). There are no six generations at all. The so-called sixth generation is just an update of CMS technology, not the development of station group technology. The main reason why there are four, five and six generations is that they do not understand what website group technology is and do not understand the development of website group technology.
Below, I will give a brief introduction to what website group technology is, the development of website group technology, and what website group technology options are based on my personal research.
1. What is website group technology?
To understand the development of website group technology, the first thing to understand is what website group technology is.
As the name suggests, website group technology is a technology that unifies a group of scattered websites into a group. Through website group technology, we can better save costs, realize information sharing, and eliminate information islands.
2. Development of website group technology
The early days of website group technology were developed from CMS. As an extension of CMS, it can easily realize the management of single site to multi-site; data storage also adopts the centralized storage mode, that is, the information of multiple sites is stored uniformly in In a database or table, they are distinguished by tags, thus forming the first generation of station group technology.
Through the first-generation website group technology, the cost of upgrading the product from CMS to website group is reduced to a minimum, and it also meets the needs of early customers who built website groups.
With the continuous development of website clusters, the ever-increasing needs of users have posed challenges to the first-generation website cluster technology: the number of website clusters is getting larger and larger, and single database storage has restricted the speed improvement; the requirements for website interactive functions are increasing. The higher the value, the more and more unavailable the mode of generating static HTML for the entire site; as single sites continue to grow, the requirements for personalization are getting higher and higher, and there are many requirements for data expansion; users hope that existing websites can also be integrated into the group , rather than tearing down and rebuilding.
These increasingly strong demands have promoted the further development of website group technology, gradually forming the second generation of website group technology. The main signs are: the database, file system and application of each site are independent, thereby reducing the risk of the collapse of the entire website group caused by the high coupling of a single site; using LDAP technology to establish a global user system to make the user system more open and scalable; the sharing of information resources adopts an independent information exchange platform to realize open sharing, capture, integration and other operations of information.
Judging from the providers of website group products currently on the market, no company's products are beyond these two generations of technology, so website group technology should be divided into two generations, namely Web1.0 and Web2.0.
3. Selection of website group technology
Maybe many people are not concerned about the technology of the website group, but more about the products that should choose that technology. From the perspective of the above website group development, the second generation website group technology has obvious advantages. But what are the specific advantages of the second-generation website group technology?
At present, most of the website group products use Web1.0 technology; very few products use Web2.0, and as far as I know, there are only two: TRS and Western Dynamics. Here we take the We7 website group management system, a product of Western Dynamics, as an example. The reason why We7 was chosen over TRS is because We7's CMS is an open source product, which is very tempting for our users. hey-hey.
Benefits of the second generation website group technology (taking We7 as an example):
1) Station group management
Using a dedicated site group server, it can be deployed independently; it has an independent website group management tool. Provides powerful batch processing, monitoring, generation, and management functions for multiple sites. It solves the shortcomings of the first-generation station group technology that station groups are subsidiary functions or extended functions of CMS and have weak management capabilities.
2) Sub-station independence
The sub-site is completely independent, has a completely independent database and file system, and can be downloaded to other servers to run independently. However, in the first-generation station group technology, sub-sites are not independent and cannot operate without the system; and the interactive function is quite poor.
3) Information sharing
Use a dedicated shared server to allow heterogeneous sites to share, synchronize and deliver information. For example, the We7 site group management system has an open design architecture that allows any third-party CMS system to develop information sharing adapters to achieve heterogeneous sharing of information across websites on different platforms. The first-generation station group technology cannot be shared outside the system.
4) Single sign-on and unified user management
Using DLAP technology, intra-group roaming, intra-group authorization management, and intra-group SSO single sign-on of each sub-site are realized, and other systems can be integrated into this unified user management system. For website groups using first-generation technology, because the data is in the same database, there is no real SSO single sign-on.
5) Scalability
In the We7 station group management system, sub-stations can expand other business systems without any restrictions, including the expansion of database structures and third-party development of business systems. However, the first-generation station group technology can only be expanded as a whole using the same database structure.
6) Large-scale operation capabilities
The top-down design and architecture based on the site group allows sub-sites to be deployed on different servers with an unlimited number of servers, fundamentally solving the problem of distributed deployment; and We7 is more suitable for the operation scale of 100,000-level sites. The first-generation site group technology is generally developed from the CMS content management system and is suitable for site group applications of an order of magnitude within 100.
7) Business customization capabilities
It realizes the customization of the data model provided by the single-site system, allowing users to customize the data format according to different business needs, thereby achieving simple business expansion capabilities. The first-generation station group technology generally does not have, or only provides the function of adding limited fields of articles.
8) Website distributed deployment
Independent site publishing is realized. Whether it is static information or more interactive functions, it can be published to different servers, thereby achieving a complete distributed deployment. The first-generation site group technology is generally released as a static HTML site, and the dynamic interaction part needs to be concentrated on the main server, causing great pressure. In fact, it is a partially distributed deployment.
It can be seen from the above points that the advantages of website group products developed based on the second-generation website group technology are far greater than those developed based on the first-generation technology. Whether in terms of performance or management, the products developed based on the second-generation technology are superior to those developed based on the first-generation technology. There is a lot of room for development. Let’s talk about the benefits first. Which type of product to choose should be chosen based on your own situation.
Thanks to brwdylpwgy for your contribution