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Reader Input: Picking A CMS – Part 2

Kevin Lloyd — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:13:23 +0000

In The Series

On the quest for the perfect CMS (Picking a CMS Part 1), I’ve decided to switch focus a little bit.

New Standards

As you guys can see, I’ve had way too much on my hands to do a thorough job on the quest for the perfect Content Management System. But then something came to mind. Aren’t we all busy? No matter how wondering or beautiful a CMS is; it’s not use if all that beauty is buried so deep that people can’t find it. If you have to dig more than three (3) pages down on a Google Search page, then it’s not good enough.

Popularity – Just Like In High School

I know, I know, it isn’t fair, but that’s how life is. The popular guys got the girls, they made the football team, and they drive better cars. That’s just how life is. If a CMS is popular enough, it’s going to have certain things going for it.

It’s going to have more contributors. That means more eyes on the code (let’s hope that this will be a good thing). The more people that know about it means, the more people that write about it. Now I will admit, there’s a little “chicken vs. egg” thing going on there. Maybe it gets popular because people write about it. But for our purposes it doesn’t matter. The fact is, there will be more formal and informal documentation.

I’ll be the first to admit that popular doesn’t always mean better. Take Wordpress for instance. Although I’ve never looked, I’ve been assured that the code is quite mangled. But notice what I said, I’ve never looked, and neither will your clients. No matter how elegant your code is and how fast it runs; none of that matters if your product doesn’t get out there do serve it’s purpose. With all it’s flaws, I’ve seen Wordpress run some of the largest blogs out there, so they must be doing something right. No one returns a BMW because they don’t like the layout of the engine.

So what does populartiy mean? Sorry to all the new kids on the block. You might be cool, but I just can’t take that risk.

Plugins, Modules and Addons.

I don’t care what you say, no matter how cool a CMS is, it will never everything that you want it to do. That’s why we need tons of plugins, modules, addons or whatever you want to call them. Let’s face it, clients always know what they want, until they don’t and you have to radically change your plans.

Also, plugins are an excellent way for other people to contribute to the community without having to hack the core or something.

New Playbook – 20 Minute Dry Run

With all of this said, I have a new plan of attack. I’m going to right some of these CMSs off the list right off the bat. Again, I’m sorry to the new comers. It isn’t fair, but that’s just the way it is. New platforms run the risk of being underdeveloped and not very well documented or supported. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take on a client’s site.

To get things on one baseline, I’m actually using a previous site as a common ground for testing. It encompasses some common functionality that I feel all CMSs should be able to handle: Images, Blogs, etc.

Where Are We So Far?

I’ve been told that Frog CMS is an excellent choice of a CMS. However, based on my new rules it’s not an option. It’s been in verion 0.9.5 since April 2009. And recently the author (yes, I think there’s only one) posted a Still Alive post. So, no offense, but this one’s not for me.

ModX seems to have a huge list of Extras on it’s page, so it’s still on my list. I’m assuming this shows an active community. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

What Have I Tried?

Those who ignore the past are destined to repeat it.

Leave The Past In The Past

These words are what keep me away from Joomla. I left Joomla at version 1.5 over three (3) years ago. Although people always swear this is true, the version numbers don’t show enough significant change from the mess I remember. So, I’m not touching this thing with a ten foot pole.

Testing The Drupal Waters

I did bite the bullet and installed Drupal. I mean, if it’s good enough for the President of the United States, I should at least give it a try, don’t you think? There are some things that I like so far:

Admin Templates/Themes - The backend is extremely flexible. You can change the look, and even the menus that are listed. With a few modules, you can fine tune the permissions and give clients access to only what you want them to have. So, the argument of “too complicated for clients” can be countered.
Template Caching – I’m not sure how it works, but I love it. Certain things in the template are cached. One of which being the CSS and JS files. You can even combine and minify these. I just love that.
Multisites – You can set up a nice little web farm that all runs on the same Drupal core code. They can even share custom modules. I’m guessing it’s something like Wordpress MU, but I’ve never tried this myself.

Onward and Upward

The quest continues with Silverstripe and ModX. Stay tuned.

Reader Input: Picking A CMS – Part 1

Kevin Lloyd — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:09:28 +0000

In The Series

Define The Problem

In the past, I’ve done some freelance Web Development and Web Design for different clients. One question I’ve always had to ask myself is:

How will the user be updating this website?

That question is usually preempted by a question to the client:

Do you have any HTML experience?

I can count (on one hand) the number of times that I’ve heard a yes to this question. To be quite honest, I don’t even know why I ask it anymore. Hardly any of my clients ever had HTML experience and even if they did, I doubt they’d want to go through the hassle. So this poses the very interesting question How do you pick a CMS (content management system) for a web project?

What Not To Do – Pure HTML is wrong for many reasons

Over the years, I’ve had much experience in this area (what not to do). Gone are the days when people simply wanted a web presence. Those days, things were simple. You fire up your copy of Frontpage (oh how we’ve learned from then) and designed a website for a client and stick it onto an FTP server, and viola; you’re done. Worst case scenario, they call you up seven (7) months later and say they’ve changed their phone number and need you to make an update.

That might have been fine back then, but right now clients expect a lot more for their money. In this day and age when everyone is worried about SEO ranking and the phrase Content Is King has been coined, no one wants to have to call you up (and God forbid; pay you) to make regular updates to their website. It is expected that you provide some sort method of updating their site.

With that said, providing a purely HTML solution is not user friendly and it can be down right dangerous. Do you really want to give your users full access to the HTML files that comprise the website? What if they break something in the layout while editing in Microsoft Word, ugh!. Who would be to blame? You would.

In the past I’ve guarded against this by using the PHP include strategy. The website would be primarily PHP with a folder called “content” sitting there with various HTML files. From there, I would pull any dynamic content that would be needed for the site: Page titles, tag lines, content blocks, etc, using standard PHP includes. This way my layout would stay (relatively) intact and the user would have access to change what they were allowed to change. The problem with this method is that they required some sort of HTML knowledge to modify the content files. They also required knowledge of FTP software and servers. Not to mention, that adding a pages or sections still needed heavy interaction from myself. Needless to say, I’ve grown from then.

Joomla! – It looked like a good idea at first

Early in my college days, I stumbled across Mambo and subsequently Joomla!, it’s current fork. It did so much for you, it had to be good, right? After installing Joomla for a client, I realized what the problem was. It just did too much. There were too many configurations, and simple things were just too hard. Also, last I remember, one of the main navigational structures was generated using and ugly and rigid table structure. Yes, I know it’s been changed by now, but that was part of my initial frustration.

It just felt too heavy for a normal website. No matter how much I restricted the user (by groups – editors as opposed to admins I think) I still got complaints about how complicated the backend interface it was. Added to that fact, the templates (and I stress) at that time were very cookie-cutter. It got to the point where I could eyeball a website built in Joomla.

Since then (over 3 years ago) I haven’t given Joomla a second look. It’s just one of those things that rubs you the wrong way once, and you never look back. Judging by the version numbers, I’m forced to assume that not much has changed. But that’s just an ignorant assumption with no basis, so please don’t hold it against me.

More To Come

I really had no idea this was going to be as long as it turned out. But sometimes I start ranting and never end. Hense, there shall be a part two where I talk about my dive into Wordpress.

All user input is encouranged; ThanX