Content management systems (CMSs) such as Joomla and WordPress dominate today’s web. Enabled by standardized extensions, administrators can build powerful web applications for diverse customer demands. However, developing CMS extensions requires sophisticated technical knowledge, and the complex code structure of an extension gives rise to errors during typical development and migration scenarios. Model-driven development (MDD) seems to be a promising paradigm to address these challenges; however, it has not found adoption in the CMS domain yet. Systematic evidence of the benefit of applying MDD in this domain could facilitate its adoption; however, an empirical investigation of this benefit is currently lacking. In this paper, we present a mixed-method empirical investigation of applying MDD in the CMS domain, based on an interview suite, a controlled experiment, a field experiment, and case studies. During the experiments, we used JooMDD, an MDD infrastructure instantiation for CMS extensions. This infrastructure, which is also presented in this work, consists of a DSL with model editors, code generators, and reverse engineering facilities. We consider three scenarios of developing new (both independent and dependent) CMS extensions and of migrating existing ones to a new major platform version. The experienced developers in our interviews acknowledge the relevance of these scenarios and report on experiences that render them suitable candidates for a successful application of MDD. We found a particularly high relevance of the migration scenario. Our experiments largely confirm the potentials and limits of MDD as identified for other domains. In particular, we found a productivity increase up to factor 11.7 and a quality increase up to factor 2.4 during the development of CMS extensions. Furthermore, our observations highlight the importance of good tooling that seamlessly integrates with already used tool environments and processes.

诸如Joomla和WordPress之类的内容管理系统（CMS）主导着当今的网络。借助标准化扩展，管理员可以构建功能强大的Web应用程序，以满足各种客户需求。但是，开发CMS扩展需要复杂的技术知识，并且扩展的复杂代码结构会在典型的开发和迁移方案中引起错误。模型驱动开发（MDD）似乎是解决这些挑战的有前途的范例。但是，它尚未在CMS域中被采用。在此领域应用MDD的好处的系统证据可以促进其采用；然而，目前尚缺乏对这种益处的实证研究。在本文中，我们基于访谈套件，提出了在CMS域中应用MDD的混合方法实证研究，对照实验，现场实验和案例研究。在实验过程中，我们使用了JooMDD，这是CMS扩展的MDD基础结构实例。此工作中也介绍了此基础结构，该基础结构包括带有模型编辑器，代码生成器和逆向工程设施的DSL。我们考虑了三种方案，分别是开发新的（独立的和从属的）CMS扩​​展以及将现有的CMS扩展迁移到新的主要平台版本。在我们的访谈中，经验丰富的开发人员承认这些方案的重要性，并报告了使他们成为成功应用MDD的合适人选的经验。我们发现迁移方案的相关性特别高。我们的实验很大程度上证实了MDD在其他领域中发现的潜力和局限性。特别是，我们发现在CMS扩展的开发过程中，生产率提高了11.7倍，质量提高了2.4倍。此外，我们的观察结果强调了良好工具的重要性，该工具必须与已经使用过的工具环境和流程无缝集成。