Digital Media Buzz > Power and Intuition: The Ideal CMS

Power and Intuition: The Ideal CMS

By James Zipadelli

Think of a content management system (CMS) as a library catalogue for your website. It keeps track of the Web pages in the same way a catalogue keeps track of books.

MODx, Drupal and Joomla are a few of the better-known CMSs out there. Each CMS has supporters. Many use open-source technology, which allows users to tweak the custom HTML to attain the desired result for their site. On their websites, they all claim to be easy to use, have the support that a developer needs, and features. So how can you tell the difference?

BIGSHOT senior software engineer Kenneth Crowder advises users to look at the content management systems’ demo site and tinker with it. “Play around with it and make sure it’s easy to use,” Crowder says. “If you are an average user and it has a steep learning curve it may not be the one for you.  If you are a professional, the learning curve may not be there as much.”

Ryan Thrash, chief collaborator for Dallas, Texas-based Collabpad and co-founder of MODx, says the goal of the ‘ideal’ CMS is to “give developers absolute control over their site structure, make it straightforward to have a completely custom look-and-feel through an intuitive template approach, and ultimately more usable for the content maintainers.”

Crowder says the ideal CMS needs two things: allowing the developer to expand the website, and for the user, it needs to be intuitive and easy to use.

“It also needs to not require that the user have extensive programming knowledge,” Crowder says. “If you have programming knowledge, this may not be a problem. You may pick a CMS that is simple to use, but has limits on functionality. On the other hand, a CMS that is more complex takes longer to learn, but you can do more things to your site.”

Crowder, whose book, Using Joomla will be released in December, adds, “When deciding which CMS to use for a particular project, do not pigeonhole yourself into thinking one CMS is always the answer. It just isn’t true. I do use Joomla for most, but each website needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.”

Gerardo Dada, senior director of strategic communications for Waterloo, Canada-based  Open Text Corporation, says that two years ago, he would have made edits in a Word document and sent the edits to IT.

“Now, I’ll go in, make a change, hit publish, and it will go on the site immediately,” Dada says. “I think there is going to be a renewed interest in simplicity. CMS became too hard to use. CMS need to be better aligned with needs of customers - a tool that marketing can use rather than a tool IT can use. Marketers are taking control of Web sites and that needs to be reflected in CMS.”

“The Web is becoming the most important channel to interact with people, so marketing is taking more control of the web,” Dada adds. “More organizations are shifting Web responsibilities out of IT and marketing. Therefore a CMS needs to be better at:

• Create more engaging sites
• VanityURLs
• SEM and SEO

Dada says developers need to go from managing 100 different, disconnected Web properties and micro sites, to having a CMS that helps them work toward a single Web strategy

“The way we thought about Web is evolving,” Dada says. “Browsers aren’t the only way we will experience content anymore. Now Web content is free - multiple sites, devices, feeds, widgets, syndication to other sites and aggregation from multiple sources to reflect the collective knowledge about a topic. CMS’s need to get smarter about how to syndicate, aggregate and let community enhance content.”

Alec Julien, who has been an Information Technology Specialist at the Vermont Cancer Center for seven years, designed the Center’s website using MODx. He says he chose MODx because “it was one of the few CMSs that historically didn’t suck at handling content-heavy, section-oriented Web sites.” But he also says that with programming knowledge, there any many CMSs that would work well.

“If you have some PHP and SQL chops, you can get MODx and Drupal and Joomla and others to do just about anything you need,” Julien says. “I suppose from the webmaster’s perspective, it’d be nice to have an easier way to integrate advanced features into a site: e-commerce, forums, that sort of thing.”

“I think the next strides that need to be made are actually on the editor/author side of things,” Julien says. “WYSIWYG editing modules are a dime a dozen, but it’s hard to find one that makes it easy for an author to do more than tweak some text without inserting crappy HTML or breaking from the site’s CSS.”

James Zipadelli is a freelance journalist whose work appears in Targeted News Service, Helium.com and several publications in Boston.