The technical support web team at Symantec was using an old, home-grown, Perl-based publishing system to manage the templates and content for thousands of static HTML files. We generated and published these static HTML files for the many Symantec products, based on data from a PostgreSQL database.

One major problem was that for each language in which we produced these pages, we had a separate instance of the code and content. So, every change to the English web site would require us to make the exact same change in the French, German, Italian, etc. sites.

I built a ColdFusion-based system that separated the code from content, using XML, and that replaced the old command line-based publishing system with a much easier to use web-based application. This allowed us to use the same code base for any number of languages since the content was managed in XML, independent from the code. I also employed CVS version control for the application, code, templates, and content.

This system has proven to be a tremendous success. It allows us to relatively easily produce the same web site in multiple languages with a centrally managed code base.

I would love to provide screen shots of the system here, but since it's an internal system, I probably shouldn't.