In this paper we focus on the architecture-based development of what we call directly reactive information systems on the Internet. These systems exhibit full content management of a, possibly distributed, multimedia information archive and provide for the integration of internal with external workflows. They are built to serve as open communications platform for a web-wide audience that is also involved in building, modifying, and restructuring the contents provided. All changes to the information archive have to be executed and reflected to the audience within on-line compatible time limits.Based on an actual project, the MPDB project at FSU, we derive reference architecture for this family of systems and refine it into a concrete application design. We present our solution to the DBMS management problem, inherent to this system type, and motivate the use of the components library that was developed for this task. A short look at technological alternatives to implement the architecture in a concrete system completes our presentation.Throughout the paper we refer to the now released MPDB system to explain our motivation and choices. We strive for an immediately applicable and pragmatic solution that is, nevertheless, based on a clean architecture and reusable concepts.