Should CMS be coupled with presentation?

Question

There seems to be a growing trend for CMS systems to manage not only data capture and workflow, but to be an end-to-end product that manages presentation and end user content (like comments/forums). I thought it was a pretty ridiculous, but it seems like this approach is gaining more and more traction. It seems to me that the two concepts should be completely orthogonal. The CMS needs to either publish content to database or XML repo or expose an API (RESTful or otherwise) and remain agnostic to presentation. I'm sure there are some efficiencies in coupling, but at the expense of lock-in and inflexibility.

I guess my question is, should I go with the flow or is this something I should keep fighting against?

Answer 1

My question to you is what constitutes a website? If some company wants to have forums accessible off their main site, should this be in a separate system or should it be in the same system as the code that makes the web pages? As for comments, this is much more likely to be coupled on some level along with various desired analytic data that may be desired such as if there are consistencies in the comments or user feedback given on the site.

Do you know of companies using a CMS in this way? Would you consider Word-press to be a CMS? I'd argue that you should be aware of why something may work and why it wouldn't work so that you can make a good argument either way. I'd imagine small companies may not want to implement 2 systems if there is one that can do both would be an example of why it may be good for a CMS to do both though larger companies may want to do things differently.