UNIVERSAL WCMS
An Open Source Web Content Management System and Customer Relationship
Management for e-Business
Vicente Galiano Ibarra, Héctor Migallón Gomis, David Pérez Caparrós
University Miguel Hernández, Av. de la Universidad s/n E-03202 Elche, Alicante, Spain
Juan Alejandro Palomino Benito
University of Alicante Ctra San Vicente del Raspeig s/n, E03071 Alicante, Spain
Keywords: Joomla, CMS, CRM, MySQL, PHP, Open Source.
Abstract: Web technologies bring to the companies the opportunity to show their products and services around the
world, increasing the number of potential customers. Furthermore, the evolution of these technologies in the
last few years has allowed the development of Web applications to access private customer data from
anywhere at any time, it is an important improvement to customers. This paper proposes an Open Source
tool to create and manage a Corporate Management web Site (CMS), and to provide Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) Web application without requirements of Web programming knowledge. Universal
Web Content Management System accomplishes wide range of small and medium-sized businesses
requirements, through high customization capability and low implementation cost.
1 INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, Web sites are a very important business
feature. The standard methods to interact and update
do not allow the development requirements, though
the new methods to create and deploy web sites are
becoming easier to use. It is often necessary special
web functionalities within corporate web site.
The Open Source community has provided some
tools that allow users, without large knowledges of
programming language and markup language (such
as HTML), creating and managing content with
relative ease of use. These tools are known as
WCMS (Web Content Management System)
(Cuerda, 2006). The Open Source model increase
popularity in WCMS tools. For example, Joomla!,
Drupal, or Plone (Wersin, 2001) (Boiko, 2004) are
WCMS tools.
Universal WCMS provide us a flexible and
extensible tool that allow us to create and manage
the contents of a real estate agency Web site. This
Web site also can provide a private access that could
act as a CRM tool. Our goal is a framework to create
and manage customized database fields and
associated forms to edit them. In the other hand, the
tool should also be user-friendly and configurable.
And, last but not least, be available as Open Source,
preferably under the GNU general public license,
with active support and development.
Available tools, such as Content Creation Kit
(Chaffer, n.d.), Table Manager (IW1QLH, n.d.),
Database Query (Green Mountain, n.d.), do not
fulfill all of our requirements, though each of them
certainly surpassed them in at least one (Robertson,
2002). The first version of our framework has
finished in December 2006. A last version of our
framework Universal WCMS are available for public
download from http://uwcms.sourceforge.net.
2 UNIVERSAL WCMS
OVERVIEW
Universal WCMS joins the benefits of one of the
most popular Web Content Management System,
Joomla!, with a self-developed database
management extension (a.k.a. Joomla! Component).
This extension provides Joomla! the ability to
183
Galiano Ibarra V., Migallón Gomis H., Pérez Caparrós D. and Alejandro Palomino Benito J. (2007).
UNIVERSAL WCMS - An Open Source Web Content Management System and Customer Relationship Management for e-Business.
In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on e-Business, pages 183-186
DOI: 10.5220/0002108901830186
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

manage and create customized fields and tables in a
MySQL database without using SQL sentences or
database management knowledge.
2.1 Joomla! Components
The basis of Joomla!, is the Component. It is a major
part of the overall functionality of the WCMS.
Generally, a Component is an application or a
process, that enables content or information that can
be created and controlled. A component is sited on
top of Joomla!’s scheme, but integrates closely with
the Joomla! framework itself (Graf, 2006).
Our database management tool has been
developed as a Joomla! Component extending its
core functionality as it can be seen in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Universal WCMS structure.
Universal Component consists of two sub-
components: Information System Management
and Data Management, which will be introduced in
Section 3.
2.2 Universal Component
Our goal is to achieve a universal application that
fits the requirements of a wide range of small and
medium-sized business. Therefore, we propose a
highly configurable component, where almost all the
details could be customized according to the
company requirements (Olsina, 1995) (Wokeu,
1996).
The single elements that act as basic blocks of
the Information System are known as Entities.
Entities are defined by a univocal name and several
characteristics. One example, among these
characteristics, is the requirements of attaching
images or files to the entities.
Entities can interact with the system. This is
necessary to provide additional information as an
email address and a password. After the entity is
authenticated by the system, it is allowed to read or
read/write the requested information depending on
its access level.
On the other hand, it is possible to create and
manage attributes (database fields) in order to
provide semantic meaning to the entities. Each of
these attributes belongs to a particular formatted data
type (text, date, currency…). The definition of
multiple attribute types makes possible their
appropriate validation and formatting.
Each entity is basically a data warehouse to store
records as a telephone directory. It is possible to
make links between entities in order to implement
composition or aggregation. The links have two
characteristics which defines them: direction and
cardinality. The first one states if the navigability is
unidirectional or bidirectional, also indicates which
entity is master and which entity is slave. The
second one declares the number of records from the
slave entity that can be linked to by the master
entity.
As entities, links can also contain extra
information by adding some data fields that
complete their semantic meaning. This information
does not belong to any entity that forms the link, but
it belongs to the own link. This resource is used
when the information has only sense by connecting
two records. Field management is the same in both
cases.
Figure 2: Example of relationship.
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Despite that two entities are linked, it could be
necessary to limit the access to some of its fields. In
order to solve this problem, each entity has an access
level that is checked before doing an action. On the
other hand, each field has a numeric access/edit
level. The union of both mechanisms forms a
numeric-based access system.
In Figure 2, it is shown an example where there
is an entity, “CUSTOMER”, linked to another one,
called “PROPERTY”. Due to CUSTOMER’s level
is 300, it only is allowed to view reference and
address from properties, but not price. That is
because price will be negotiated by the salesman, so
price is assigned in the information link. Final price
in the link information is visible by the customer but
not editable, just as property information.
Cardinality, shown next to arrows in Figure 2,
means that one customer can be linked to lots of
properties, while one property only can be linked to
one customer.
3 DESIGN
Application is composed by two separated parts.
Firstly, there is an administration section where lies
the information system management, entities, fields
and links configuration. The second one consists in
data management over previously created
information system by administrator users.
3.1 Information System Management
Each entity corresponds to one table in the system
database in order to logically separate data from
each entity, therefore performance will be highly
increased. In this way, tables’ records are entity
instances. For example, “Clients” entity has got a
“Clients” table where all the clients’ records will be
stored.
Moreover, field management contributes to fill
entity tables with columns or fields, because empty
tables are just empty containers where it is not
possible input any information. Those fields have
got several possible data types to belong to and they
match database own types. Every type matches a
regular expression that is called to validate input
data from users. That is very useful in order to avoid
users introducing malicious information that might
cause some system malfunction. Furthermore,
maximum and minimum length can be configured in
almost every data types.
Links are configured by selecting a master and
slave entity. Both entities can be the same, in which
case, it would be linked to itself. We must also
specify cardinality (one to one or one to many) and
exclusivity (one slave record can be linked by
another master record). As well as entities, each link
creates a table in the database in order to store link
instances.
Link fields have a similar behavior than entity
fields, but fields are added as columns in link table.
This way, every pair of records can store
information about them. Information System
Management is an independent section in order to
avoid that all users have permissions to modify the
company Information System.
Figure 3: Customer view. List of properties.
UNIVERSAL WCMS - An Open Source Web Content Management System and Customer Relationship Management for
e-Business
185

3.2 Data Management
Data Management implements the tools to
administrate all the information stored in the
Information System. The main management data
options about selected entity are: Look up,
New/Edit Record, and Delete Record. Form is
divided in a required tab, Details and four optional
tabs that depend on entity configuration: User Info,
Image, Files, and Links.
4 APPLICATIONS
Universal WCMS provides a complete solution that
joins Web site implementation with CMS and a
CRM application, and can be accessed via Web from
anywhere at any time. The system can be configured
to store and display any kind of product (properties,
books, language courses...).
A real company already use Universal WCMS.
Their customer should be able to access to a private
area where they could read personalized comments,
see private information about their properties: final
price, drafts… (Figure 3 and Figure 4), and modify
their contact information: name, telephone number,
email…
5 CONCLUSIONS
Universal WCMS is a flexible and highly
customizable tool. Wide range of companies can use
it to implement their Web sites and CRM’s in an
easy manner. Furthermore, they will be able to
provide a private access to their customers and offer
them personalised information.
Universal WCMS is open source itself and built
using other freely available open source projects. It
is freely distributed and we encourage private
companies to test it and compose their personalized
site without complex tasks and high costs.
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Figure 4: Administrator view. Property Management.
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