eLectos is the tool developed by Data Access to use with WebApp for Dynamic Content Publishing or its more popular synonym Content Management System (CMS)
eLectos is also the bases for the VDF-GUIdance website that you are currently looking at.

The original author for this is Folkert Klemme.
He donated all of his work on eLectos to the Open Source Community with one major restriction.
Do _not_ ask for his support on the product

So how does it work?

Everytime you click on a link, or ask for a specific URL from a eLectos driven website, the WebApp will first try to identify your type (and capabilities) of your browser along with the ID of the page you requested.
Based on this information the CMS engine will search the database to find all elements which make up a page.
Such an element can contain pictures, links, texts, html, javascript, flash or other browser plugins.
Depending on what your browser has to offer, the CMS engine will send different content.
On top of that you can format a page by using different styles which in turn are based on stylesheets.

The different elements are combined with formatting information by your browser.

The current version is not using an XML interface, but plain webapp.
A future version will be supporting serverside XML/XSL techniques, this will not be part of the current release.

Presentations

for more info see the powerpoint presentation at:
ftp://ftp.mijnwebapp.nl/osd/open%20eLectos/Open%20eLectos%20Preview%20Corroboree%202003.ppt

Links to other CMS systems

Postnuke PHP and MySQL solution for CMS
Wiki a start point in Wiki websites
Open Wiki a CMS engine in ASP supporting MySQL, MS SQL and MS Access runs on IIS
JAHIA CMS and Portal server in Java
OpenCMS java CMS
Campsite duh, don't know, but it should be good
Midgard - Open Source Application Server
MMBase A very complete Open Source CMS system that works with both Apache and IIS, MySQL, Informix, PostgresSql. A port to Oracle is in the pipeline.