You’re right that both CPS and PMS are necessary (in some form) for the vast majority of sites, which would suggest that they should be bundled as is done in Plone (and is done to a greater or lesser extent by Autonomy, OpenText, Day and others). That said I regularly see cases where having production separated from delivery is valuable – the most common example being organisations that want to add content management to an existing website, without throwing out their investment in a specific delivery platform.

It also allows organisations to leverage best of breed in both camps – I’m particularly excited to hear of integrations between Alfresco and Drupal (for example), since I think those implementations (when well executed) can result in a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts. That said there are downsides, which I touched on in my earlier post.

As for your specific questions:

1) A visitor to a public website logs in to a ‘members only’ section and searches for some content. The search results displayed are filtered by that users access rights, groups, etc.

ACLs can be managed as content on the production side, then interpreted as ACLs by the presentation technology (which would also include the authentication mechanism etc.). Ensuring principals line up between the production and presentation tiers can be a little complex, but there are numerous solutions to that challenge (such as managing presentation-side principals as part of the content model too).

2) An intranet allows employees to create articles to be published on the site. They click on the ‘add article button’ on the intranet and add content and save it. It is reviewed and published by another member of staff. Other users of the intranet see that article and want to comment on it, they click the comment button below the article and type their comment and hit submit.

To me this use case is best handled by a pure-play PMS, perhaps integrated with a generic ECM platform if the intranet is document-centric. The production process in this case is typically much simpler than the ‘enterprise-wide authoring / publish to public internet’ production process, so I don’t think a fully fledged CPS is normally justified in this case.

We see this use case regularly at Alfresco, and the standard implementation pattern tends to evolve towards Alfresco DM managing documents behind the intranet UI, which itself is implemented using a dedicated PMS (Drupal and LifeRay being common examples).

On are more serious note, I really can’t see how these two can be sanely separated. OK, so maybe I’m blinded by the fact the CMS I spend all day working with (Plone) does both the CPS and the PMS as you describe above.

Let me describe a couple of use-cases and see if you can explain to me which parts would handle which, and how the two halfs could be decoupled to any meaningful level:

1) A visitor to a public website logs in to a ‘members only’ section and searches for some content. The search results displayed are filtered by that users access rights, groups, etc.

2) An intranet allows employees to create articles to be published on the site. They click on the ‘add article button’ on the intranet and add content and save it. It is reviewed and published by another member of staff. Other users of the intranet see that article and want to comment on it, they click the comment button below the article and type their comment and hit submit.

-Matt