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What is Instant Content Management?

Instant Content Management (ICM) is an open source web content management system written in Java.

ICM -in its previous versions- has been used commercially since some years and is a stable application.

What makes it different?

You may wonder why another open source content management system appears in the over-crowded CMS world. Well, the reason is simple: web content management is a complicated task, and all the existing systems try to solve it in a different flavour, to cover some specific needs.

For end users

With ICM, end users edit their web pages directly on the web page itself. I.e. the editable areas are activated so that the content can be edited by double-clicking on it. It can't be easier than that.
End users can perform just the basic funtions, like insert new content, modify/delete existing content, upload new documents or images, and put the site online.

For web developers

ICM does not lock you into a custom template language, but you can choose among a variety of standard languages such as XSLT, PHP and (upcoming) JSP.

Web developers must integrate their web site in ICM in order to make it editable. This is the price for the painstaking end-user usability.
Web developers can manage the entire site through the administration interface.

ICM doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, but just implements content management in the most well known and understood way: it is based on an SQL engine (RDBMS), where all the content is stored. The content can be retrieved as a "channel" (i.e. sql query); every web page can display one or more channels. All this through simple wizards that cover the nasty RDBMS details.

Are there alternatives?

Of course, depending on your needs and your industry, you are offered many, many open source alternatives. Here a list of some of them:

• PHP Nuke: probably the most known portal engine written in PHP. There are a lot of clones, spin-offs and similar projects.
• Mambo: a very successful portal engine and content management system.
• Drupal: a portal engine written in PHP.
• Typo3: a content management system, for enterprise purposes.
• Jahia: an integrated content management and corporate portal server.
• OpenCMS: an integrated content management system.
• Web GUI: another integrated content management system.
• Various CMS in Java: an almost complete list of the currently available open source CMS in Java.

The purpose of this introduction, was to stress that there are already many very good CMS, so you will have to pick up the one you prefer based only on your taste (hoping that ICM is your preferred taste ;) ).