Design of a distributed P2P-based content management middleware

There is an emerging need for content management systems (CMS) enabling collaborative development, administration, and distribution of content over the Internet. Many CMS solutions are currently based on a client/server architecture with a central server for storage and management. While such centralized systems simplify management with respect to data consistency, security, and accountability, they lack scalability and reliability. Pure peer-to-peer (P2P) network architectures are based on the assumption that no central server exists and has to be relied on, since peers collaboratively provide content and core system functionality that would be provided otherwise by a single server. A P2P-based CMS scales much better, since available system resources increase linearly with the number of participating peers. In addition, the availability of the system can be raised without much effort, by increasing the redundancy of content across the peer.