As mentioned in the CMS Primer section, the distinction between CMS and application development is bluring - both are ideally fashioned with a single set of tools.  Applications manage information, and so do CMS systems.  Generally we say that websites and applications share the goal of providing various contextual views on content items.  Applications go further in providing ways to easily change and recalculate the contexts of items.

CMS's are now delivering applications within their fold, and applications are now improving their usability and documentation, taking much from what has been learned about web site interactivity in the last 10 years.  We have veered away from viewing CMS as simply software for publishing static web pages.  Instead website templates can house applications and forms, and the Presto administration interface aims to organize and manage application data (provided that it can fit in a Presto form; customization to handle other cases is expected).

Presto aims to seamlessly integrate web applications along-side more or less static content.  For this reason we have not started with a publishing model that creates static html pages.  Page caching exists in Presto to mimic the efficiency of static webpages.  It can be employed anywhere that is suitable, but any page can be by default dynamically generated every time it is requested, and so can call on calendar, discussion forum, search system, banner add etc. functionality without complicated javascript or other systems that have static pages retrieve dynamic content within them.