It's also easy to rotate content this way. If you have a list of
articles somewhere on your site (possibly the front page) you can just
make a call to the database instead of having to rewrite HTML every
time you add an article. Just list the five newest articles, and if
you add content regularly, this list will constantly be updated.
Another feature that I've omitted here for time's sake is the
expiration of articles. Suppose you have a news article that applies
only to this week - next week no one will ever read the article, so
you want to get rid of it. By adding a simple step and another field
in your database, you can add an expiration date. Then write a simple
script that can be scheduled (go
here for a tutorial on scheduling scripts) to check
the database periodically and see if an article's expiration date is
passed. If it is, you can use the FSO to delete the article, delete
the database entry, or simply uncheck the Published field. Very handy.
The moral of the story is, who needs to pay big bucks for great content
management? With a few tweaks and modifications, this system we've
described will work very well and handle most anything you could throw
at it. Using the basics from this system, you could create a larger
workflow management system, where you manage more than just articles,
and track them from all over a network.
