Cofax is a web-based text and multimedia publication system.  It was designed to simplify the presentation of newspapers on the Web and to expedite real-time Web publication.

It was designed originally at Knight Ridder to serve the content for several of its newspapers, including its largest, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News.  These sites are using Cofax and serving tens of millions of page views a month.

The application to generic content management for text, images, and documents of any format (PDF, DOC, etc) involves very little work.  Document versioning can be hooked in with end-of-publication dates enforced through the CDS (Content Display System).

Programming, installation, and training effort for a low-complexity generic publication system, soup to nuts, is about 2 months for a single developer.

Cofax for the Microsoft Windows platform

• Windows 2000/2003 Server
• Internet Information Server
• Jakarta Tomcat Servlet Server

Critical Components

• The Cofax CFS - Cofax Feed System
• The Cofax CDW - Cofax Data Warehouse
• The Cofax CMS - Content Management System
• The Cofax CDS - Content Display System (with templates)

Criteria for Selection

1. Ease of use.  The templating system and the content management toolset requires minimal training and technical support.
2. Content/Design/Logic seperation.  Content creators and designers are free to create without needing technical support.  System logic can be changed without requiring changes to design or content.
3. High performance/scalability at reasonable cost.  The largest sites on the Knight Ridder network are serving tens of millions of page views a month.
4. Platform independence.  Not having to rely on one single vendor for app server, operating system, or even database.
5. Database logic independence.  A fatal flaw of most similar systems is their tieing to one database schema and platform.  Changes to schema in most systems require massive changes to source code.  It was a goal of Cofax to solve this technological problem.
6. Flexibility on importing the various, and highly disparate news feeds that are provided by newspapers.
7. Static site look and feel.  URLs are simple and navigatable. Sites are indexable by standard search engine technologies.

Screenshots of the Editor's Tools being used

1. Editors Tools for the Inquirer
2. Searching for an Article
3. Editing an Article
4. Adding Images to an Article
5. Editing Related Links
6. What the page looks like
7. Ordering a Section
8. Editing an Section

Diagrams  (system-specific are philly.com and InfiNet (now GMTI) implementations)

• Cofax 1.5 Class Interaction
• High-level architecture of integration with print-publishing and other systems
• Hardware Setup at an ISP Hosting Several Publications - Presentation Layer
• Hardware Setup at an ISP Hosting Several Publications - Management & Editors' Tools Layer
• Hardware Setup for a Medium-Size Publication
  (Diagram by Jeff Spicher Team Leader, Product Development InfiNet)

Why Cofax chose Java...

More on the Technology behind Cofax...

I haven't used or even tested this product.  It's open source, a mature product, and looks very comprehesive (seems to be a full DAV, intuitive GUI, etc.).  The interface is strictly Windows, as opposed to browser, but it looks very usable.  I'd like to test this sometime...

Guided tour of OpenCms

Quick Peek:  Management  and  Edit.

References.

It costs a lot of money, but otherwise it's a proven solution many companies like.

References.

Icoya OpenContent is an on-the-web document management and publication system.

References.