1. Content Managment Systems, e.g. OpenMarket, RedDot, Interwoven, eGrail.
2. Application Server (Frameworks|System), e.g. Zope, WebLogic.

Some systems, e.g. Vignette can do both, and are very expensive, complex and rare.

News systems such as Slash and Everything are quite different, and while excellent at what they do, they are not CMS or AppServers - though they may use them....

I would define a CMS as a system of storing and organising data, so that you can publish it on the web. A CMS may have an internal script language for end-user use, but it's really a system of working out who can create and edit content, work-flowing content, and finally publishing it.

There are lots of CMS:

• Red Bridge Interactive - DynaBase, engenda or entrepid
• RedDot Solutions - RedDot
• Idetix - Revize
• Also see ClueFul CMS and Camworld CMS lists

A CMS systems costs from US$20k to US$250k, and often four or five times the licence cost in installation and configuration.

There are some open source and free CMS offerings, but they have struggled, as it's a complex undertaking that's not proved very helpful to open source development, and several of the products in this sector have failed because the company backing them went under.

An AppServer, is typically a script enabled delivery engine, ideally talking to the CMS to get it's content. You write delivery rules and pages are assembled dynamically from allowed or published content.

AppServers are your typical J2EE monsters, big and expensive, and usually Java based:

• iPlanet Application Server
• IBM Application Server
• BEA WebLogic
• Zope (Python as used by ActiveState)

It sounds like what you are describing is more like a Perl (mod_perl) based AppServer, with a back end database. Content isn't managed like in a CMS system, but more in the way that a News site running Slash or Everything would.

The problem I found, was that other than Interwoven (very expensive) most of the commercial CMS space is not friedly towards Perl, and many of the open source offerings are Java based too. Most of the AppServers are Java or ASP too, so another unfrieldy space. I think that while Slash and Everything are good, they are mostly on their own as Perl offerings

Disclaimer: I use to work for a mid-sized CMS vendor, we built an XML based light-weight CMS system with integrated light weight AppServer abilities, and based on that a heavy duty CMS, that exported/linked to third party AppServers. The Products were written in c++, ran on Solaris iPlanet or NT/IIS, and had a typical selling price of US$350k. Serious CMS systems are VERY expensive.

Good luck in your search...