This paper presents an applied research project for content management which aims to the creation of a university web portal using the XML technology. The work has been carried out in order to reorganize the obsolete HTML based web site.

The paper objective is to analyse the main issues involved in the migration process from HTML to XML based content management.

The basic issues identified, concerning the creation and management of a medium-large size university web site, include homogeneous presentation, orienteering, navigation and search facilities, resource and competence availability necessary for keeping content updated, etc. From the analysis also emerged that only a minor part of the whole site information does not change, such as history or location, while a part may change occasionally, a part regularly like courses, timetables etc., and another part may be newly generated on a week base rate, such as news, events, and seminar announcements.

On the basis of this situation a dynamic content management solution has been envisaged to be effective and has been adopted. A number of issues concerning the budget, low in public university, and scale, neither small nor as large as in big companies/universities, determined the choice of the tool for its implementation and deployment. The Apache Cocoon XML open source tool has been selected and its separation of concerns model exploited. Cocoon provides effective support for the external and internal end users' needs: navigating and browsing the content, checking information and publishing in an easy and quick way, controlling access and roles, guaranteeing security, and supporting workflow management.

The fundamental separation of the content from its presentation style and from logic is managed by means of contents stored in XML or in a DB and accessed through the Cocoon ESQL logicsheet, and the use of XSL stylesheets for their presentation. This permits to reuse the same content in different contexts filtering out different information, to guarantee style consistency for presentation of similar pages, and to differentiate content presentation in various contexts.

The XML technology is used here in order to represent and present information about news, teaching, research and services of the school. In addition, it is used for defining and controlling the site navigation within a menu xml file and to share common contents. The goal is also to optimize the content maintenance process which can guarantee a higher quality and an up to date web site with useful information both for students and staff. The project development is an on going long process which currently consists of the completion of some modules. In particular, the data about courses and curricula have been collected via XSP web pages and stored in a data base in order to make them available also to other existing applications already in use internally within the administration department. Contents are retrieved in XML format and uniformly formatted both as HTML pages or PDF printing files via XML-FO and Apache-fop. The graphical design has been accomplished by exploiting the expertise of the Applied Arts Department on the basis of usability criteria and of XSL and CSS stylesheets.