We live in a time where people have an amazing amount of power when it comes to publishing. Blogging, podcasts, vidcasts (or whatever you call ‘em) and more have been put into the hands of millions and it’s changing the way we live and work.
Despite all of that, content management for the web remains a huge pain point for many individuals and businesses. The amount of time, effort and money that’s involved (and often wasted) to do things that are seemingly rather straightforward is astronomical. I mean, how hard does it have to be?
Content publishing and management can be extremely complex, and therefore not surprisingly hard to do. Having said that, the biggest problems with content management lie not in that complexity, but in how we approach our solutions.
How’s that for a paradox? Welcome to the world of content management.
So, where do we start looking for a better way to “do” content management? Let’s take a hard look at the issues; starting with how most of us perceive content management.
Content Management vs. CMS
Without wishing to state the obvious, content management needs to be all about the content. However, when most of us think (or talk, or read) about content management we are quick to associate it with a specific technology - the CMS.
That, my friends, is our first, and probably our biggest, mistake. “CMS” should in no way define content management. If you’re currently in content management = CMS mode you should really take the time to step back and look at what you’re doing. You may find out that you’re wasting time, money and effort on something that’s not providing much, if any, value.
There are four important pieces to the content management puzzle: content, people, process and technology. Let’s look at those individually.
Content Management is About Content
Well, now that we’ve pulled the “system” out, let’s look at defining “content.” Here’s where it gets tricky. Content can mean a lot of things. You could be publishing all sorts of content; pages, articles, mp3s, events, and so on. You could have a variety of different mediums (html, images, movies) all of which have a different way of being created, maintained, and published.
And that doesn’t even take into account semantic issues. What’s the difference between a “page” and an “article?” What about an article and a blog entry? A blog entry and a news item. Sometimes these may seem obvious, other times it’s not as clear.
There is no one clear definition for content - it’s different for every situation and it’s important to keep this in mind. Don’t let the content be defined by the technology, for example, that’s something that most content management systems will do for you (or to you!).
Content Management is About People
You need to have people in order to properly manage content. Content can’t be created by a system and it doesn’t manage itself. Pretty clear, right? I think so, yet I’m constantly amazed at how often the people aspect is left out of the solution.
I could write a book on how to create, manage and maintain content and it would begin with something about hiring the right people.
In order to do content right you’ve got to make sure there are people in place and that they’re set up to use the systems you have. Find out if you even need a CMS, for example. Sometimes you’ll find that by having people with the right skills in place eliminates the need for a “CMS” altogether. Instead you may want to deploy technology that helps with the process itself, or nothing at all, in effect using people instead of technology to manage your content.
I think many folks would be surprised at how much time, effort and money can be saved simply by putting people before technology when it comes to resources.
Content Management is A Process
I think this defines the term “content management” the best. It’s a process. Take a look at why people want to manage content. What are they trying to express? What are their goals? What are the real problems they’re having? How do they interact with technology? These questions should be answered before any sort of system or technical solution is applied.
I think we can safely assume that most people who actually have to work with content management don’t care too much about the technology, aside from whether or not it works well. They just want to correct an error, publish their thoughts, share their knowledge. In order to provide the best solution, we need to understand those goals first. Then we need to establish a solid process.
If the process is flawed everything that follows will also be flawed. Unfortunately what normally happens is the process is created around the technology, which is usually hard to use, and everything falls apart.
But enough of that, as my pal Sean said recently, “consulting on process could be an industry unto itself.” Let’s talk tech.
Content Management is About Technology
When it comes to content management, technology should be a means to an end. It should be a way to help people accomplish their goals. This can be done in many different ways and should not be limited to what we traditionally think of as a CMS.
I realize that the promise of a CMS as a suite of technologies to help people with content management is a good one. However, good intentions don’t always come with good results. When it comes to CMSs, this is usually a bit of an understatement.
The usual problem with that is most CMSs aren’t really built to address the specific needs and problems of the people and processes you’ll have in place. Even when geared to a specific type of content or industry they often miss the mark.
This can be the result of a few problems common to many “out-of-the-box” solutions:
- They’ve got an overly complicated feature-set. With most systems you’ve got a bunch of advanced features that don’t often get used. If they do it’s usually after someone’s spent tons of time learning the system. Heck, I don’t know how many times I’ve thought to myself, “I could teach the content contributors how to access static files and write XHTML quicker.” Regardless, if people don’t use the features, they’re not really useful.
- They’re too inflexible. They don’t allow for easy customization (in more ways than one) and require significant resources (time, effort and money) to mold them to what you want. Sometimes that can be as simple as getting the content to display correctly or getting the CSS to render as it should.
- They’re not tailored to the specific content you want to publish. Jeff Croft recently wrote a nice piece on personal content management that illustrates this well. He points out that, “the single biggest problem with content management is that personal CMS tools don’t facilitate structured data as well as they should. Instead, they give you a few fields and let you figure out how to best fit your content into them.” Very true, and this causes all sorts of problems.
- They’re too hard to use. A CMS can be hard to learn, or simply too cumbersome for your teams to learn and use. This goes back again to people. There is a commonly held and horribly wrong belief that technology will make things so easy that the need for human involvement goes away. CMSs don’t run themselves, and if the people won’t use it, you’ve got a problem.
For a technological solution (CMS or otherwise) to work it needs to be tailored to the specific content management problems you’re facing. Simply picking and adding a CMS will not usually do it and can end up in lots of wasted time, effort and money. Sorry, folks, it’s more complicated than that.
Some Solutions
So we’ve got a solid, holistic definition of content management and we’ve talked a bit about the problems therein. But what about solutions? Well, I think we’ve already taken the biggest step in reframing the problem, but I’ve got some specific ideas as well.
Get Some People
To manage content properly you have to have people involved. That’s the first step. Put a person (or better, persons) in charge of your content. Give that person the empowerment to make decisions that relate to content.
If nothing else, do this before you do anything with technology. I mean it!
Define Your Content and Establish a Process
Next you need to clarify goals, define roles, and so on. A big part of that is to make sure everyone involved has a clear understanding of the content you’ll be managing. It’s not rocket science and should be fairly easy to pin down, but make sure and eliminate any semantic problems here.
It’s probably a good idea to be specific. For example; determine the that you’re publishing news articles vs. features, etc. Don’t limit yourself to something generic like words vs. photos.
Once you’ve got the people in place and your content defined, you’ll want to establish a solid process. Take some time and set up an editorial calendar and work on learning how the people involved will work together and with the technologies you’ve got in place.
Help Technology Help You
And now we get to the tricky part. The idea here is to discover a technical solution (not a system) that will enable the people to manage the process.
Let’s look at that again. Enable the people to manage the process. So, the “solution” needs to provide tools (publishing and otherwise) to help the people create, publish and maintain content.
There are a lot of canned solutions out there and I could give you a laundry list of this CMS and that CMS, but until you’ve solved the problems above you’d be wasting your time (and likely lots of money) exploring them. The enabling technology could be a CMS or it could extend beyond that, depending on the process and needs of your people.
One of the biggest problems with most CMSs is that they aren’t flexible enough to handle a wide variety of work styles and publishing problems. In many cases, somewhat surprisingly, they’re not tailored enough to the specific content they’re managing. They require hacking and lots of it.
In truth most CMSs end up being custom, regardless of how they start out. From those that bill themselves as one-size fits all to the highly specialized systems which deal with specific industries or types of content. It’s just a matter of how much hacking you’ll need to do to get to what works for your people.
Keeping that in mind, the case could be made for always building a custom solution (not necessarily a CMS) to suit the needs of the particular content, people and processes your working with.
It sounds daunting, but this is where I think the true promise of a technical content management solution lies. With frameworks like Django, CakePHP, Ruby on Rails and the like we can create custom solutions and construct custom systems that are extendable and much more flexible than most of what’s available today.
I don’t want to trivialize the development of these solutions. Building a custom CMS from scratch, for example, would be very difficult. However, it’s important to note the current costs and effort involved with most pre-built CMSs out there. They’re usually really expensive and already requires tons of work to implement in most cases. It’s going to cost you regardless. Doesn’t it make sense to put that money, time and effort into a true custom solution?
I think so. I mean, yes, you’d need specialized resources for development, but it seems as if you need those most times anyway. I know I’d rather offer my clients resources working toward a custom solution than learning yet another proprietary system.
So you could look at a development framework, as opposed to a canned system. That way instead of “hacking” you could “develop.”
Also with a framework, you can extend beyond Web publishing and build specific tools to help the process. An interactive editorial calendar comes to mind, or brainstorming tools. Of course, if you avoid the “one CMS as as a product” mentality, you could probably find lots of smaller, more specific, products that when pulled together are much more enabling than any bloated, proprietary CMS full of features your people will never actually use.
Confused yet?
I promise, the goal of this piece wasn’t to confuse you, and I know that it’s a whole lot to take in.
Here’s the bottom-line: content management can’t be trivialized. And it can’t be perceived as technology first; as a canned product or silver-bullet that’ll eliminate the need for people or processes.
If you’re serious about your content, and you should be, then take the time to do it right. Get the right people in place, clearly define your content, establish a solid process and then work on getting a custom technology solution that brings everything together and truly enables your people and processes.
Aside from the piece by Jeff Croft, this is one of the best written articles I have read on Content Management. I just wrote an article myself about CMS’s on my site yesterday, and have been pondering exactly what you have clearly stated in your article.
I look at some systems and think ‘why the heck do I have to jump through those hoops just to define a style and apply it to a page. I could do this much easier with the CSS and a template file to work with?’ Its about a level of experience and goals.
And, just as what Jeff pointed out in his article - the data structures don’t always make sense. They try and shoehorn things into a CMS that doesn’t serve a bigger purpose of keeping the integrity of your data.
I could say more (and I did on my personal site) - but THANK YOU for a very clear and concise article addressing this issue. I believe you have hit the nail on the head.
There are four important pieces to the content management puzzle: content, people, and technology. Let’s look at those individually.
I only count three in that statement ;) //edit - changed!//
Good article though. I definitely outlines the problems with CMSs of today!
Nate — Thanks. What you don’t see in this article is how hard it was to write. This is such a complicated issue in so many ways. I think it’s good to have people thinking about it and if nothing else, articles like this and Jeff’s (which was great) can get people looking at content management differently, then we’ve succeeded.
Great article, Keith. I agree with everything you’ve said here 100%. Especially the point near the end about the fact that hacking up a canned CMS product is a ton of work, too — and wouldn’t that time and cost it be better spent working on a true solution that is totally appropriate for your situation, rather than an inelegant hack?
Wilson Miner, who is as good at turning Moveable Type into anything he wants it to be as anyone I know, said after he built his own CMS using Django (paraphrasing here): “Django isn’t a CMS out of the box, but after learning it, I can build a CMS that is custom-tailored to the project I’m working on a lot faster than I can hack Moveable Type into being an ugly solution.”
And it’s true. Of course, he was talking about Django, but I’m sure the same thing applies with other frameworks, too. The cost of “rolling your own” is now on par with the cost of hacking up your favorite blogging app (at least after the initial learning curve).
Jeff - - Exactly. I’ve done my share of hacking up Movable Type and have gotten pretty good at it. And, for what it’s worth, you can do some pretty good stuff hacking on MT. But it’s still hacking.
But something like MT isn’t usually what we’ve got to work with. It’s usually no where near as easy to hack and takes lots of resources. If you can get MT to work, fine, and that’s a good road sometimes, but when you start to get into really complicated hacking on a proprietary system, that’s when you start to really see the benefits of doing something truly custom, like what Wilson would do with Django or what we’re going to do with Rails at Blue Flavor.
We just want to offer the option for something custom along side the Movable Type, Contribute, Wordpress, etc. options. I think for many that will be the best way to go.
“There are four important pieces to the content management puzzle: content, people, and technology.”
Did you mean three? or was that part of the puzzle?
Keith and Adam - There are four, it was an editing misake on my end. The missing piece, in there now; is process.
RE: Jeff
I dont see django as much of a CMS as it is a framework (Maybe I just didn’t look at it deep enough). To me, a framework is a whole different ballgame from a CMS (some CMS’s could be built from a framework).
I have tested out several frameworks (Cake PHP, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Zend, Django, etc) - and they all take a learning curve - but they arent applications out of the box (as many CMS’s claim to be). I know you understand the difference between the two, I just think that comparing a framework vs. CMS is another subject.
On another note - I noticed Plone updated their CMS, then did a video comparison with 3 other frameworks - it was the most ridiculous video I have ever seen. Comparing a framework with a CMS is like comparing apples to oranges.
Ahh, this is a subject I could talk about for a long while….
Nate K — You’re right, Django is a framework, not a CMS. I don’t think anyone is saying that. I know I’m not and I’m not exactly trying to compare the too, only saying that you can leverage a framework to enable your content managment process. Is that a CMS? Maybe. Maybe not. ;0)
You’re right it’s like apples to oranges.
This kind of illustrates the problem with content managment though. Our discussions revolve around technology (and semantics), which given the audience makes sense, however it’s when that takes precidence over everything else, or we look to that technology as a silver bullet that we start to see problems.
Managing content should be user centered. The author should have maximum flexibility to change the content but also present that content in more than one way. This is beyond technicalities: you need well written content, concise and clear, a website designed to carry that function as well.
Excellent article. I spent a lot of time trying to explore majority of CMS systems available today, but every time I ended up finding that it would require a lot of custom programming and hacking to suit my (and my clients’) needs.
Now I believe it’s not about CMSes - it’s about frameworks. In the recent months (well.. years :.-)) I was developing a “universal-system-that-fits-them-all” CMS system. Of course, with no luck. Then, something in my head turned upside down, one day I woke up and I realized, that it will be a billion times more flexible to write myself a rather simple and flexible framework, on which I could build very customized solutions quite fast a simple. Individually for each client. It allows me to provide the client with absolutely customized solution that fits his needs very nicely. It saves a lot of time, too.
I would say, there is not (and never will be) a perfect CMS. Only frameworks, which will help you very much to build a specialized solution (but not very universal) individually.
Sorry for my english :)
I hope this comment doesn’t come across as spam whoring, because that is definitely not its intent.
A lot of the issues brought up here are the main reason why my friends and I created Expanse, which is a CMS created solely for artists.
Issues such as complexity, cost, and having to manipulate pre-existing solutions into a custom one is what drove us to create something different, and targeted to people we understood.
Yes it’s proprietary, yes it costs money (a whopping $30), and yes, it’s targeted to a niche, but we’re finding that artist’s would rather pay $30 dollars for something that’s just what they need, and have great support from people who truly understand their needs, rather than spending valuable time trying to hack a generic solution into something they want.
And I think that any decent CMS should do that. It IS about the users and their content, NOT about one-size-fits-no-one “solutions”. All the calendar portlets and forum modules in the world mean nothing to folks to want an easy to use photo gallery.
Most CMS’s miss the point. The really want to be everything to everyone, and miss the key fact of what content management is about, and I think you nailed it.
Great write up (Vitamin just freakin rocks).
Great article, Keith. Glad to see smart people spending so much time thinking about this. It’s an old problem, and it’s been tackled about a gazillion times in as many different ways. But it’s a sticky problem, and I think there’s a lot of room for rethinking and optimizing around it.
I’d respond in detail, but Jeff is doing a good job of quoting me so I don’t have to think about something smart to say.
I am journalist and makes both content and do some webdesing. I am right looking for a CMS to use as a base for my websites. (Plone, mambo, EZ) I totaly agree that the content managing process is important, but as far as I understand, the technolgy aspects are far more difficult and sucks too much of the total budget. I have looked at several systems and they are all to dificult to set up and configure, bad template system, changing input pages and so on. I think Macrom. Contribute looks promising but that system only works with a few pages. You have to do changes localy and then upload the pages. Takes a long time.
A custum made CMS is not the solution for very many organisations because its to expensive. Som a lot companies fallback to the readymade templates thats incuded
I have been working as the content guy on the development on many CMS as early as 1996 and I am (still) surprised to see how user hostile CMS systems still are. I think as soon as a CMS “works”, the CMSmakers skip to make it userfriendly and moves (backwards?) to implement next feature from some important customer. I see the user as e.g a writer/photographer making content, a webdesigner changing a xhtml or css template, a business guy changing the discount.
Good article. I hope for more of the same topic.
PS. Can anyone make contribute to run the updates on the webserver and not on my machine, please?
Nate - Expanse is a good example of a niche CMS. Which, if you’re going to go proprietary is a good thing, especially at the price. As well, you’ve avoided some of the problems I see with proprietary systems; the complicated feature set, for example.
So, gooooo Expanse!
I mean, Movable Type and Wordpress are good examples too; they’re great for blogging. The fact that they can (and often are) hacked into something else is to their credit. What really gets me going is all the bloated “niche” CMSes that wont give you the flexibility of say a Wordpress, don’t address the core needs of the people using them AND they cost Tens of thousands of dollars. At that price, unless it’s really a perfect fit and you’ve done your homework (people, process, etc.) you’re better off building your own.
Most CMSs nowardays have huge problems when it comes down to user-friendlyness. Edit in place plus additonal features could be a solution, people dont like Ms Word like Editors. Because people not know that B is bold, I is italic etcetera. You need to use eg highlighting tools instead of always the buttons. Find different ways to interact between CMS and author.
What happens if the website and its backend have problems with eg optimization, backup etcetera. WHo are you gonna call … Ghostbusters? So you have a maintenance problem.
Editorial problems: not every soul can write descend well structured copy.
Eg With Expanse you cannot create custom fields, like eg dimensions, oil on canvas or aquarel, or sell this painting,
How ironic that I would read this post today. Just finished a custom ExpressionEngine site for an organization that was all excited about building on their own CMS site. News and articles and biblios and you name it. They were gonna publish it.
Got some .doc files in the mail this morning with a request to post them. The site has an online manual written especially for it and 16 screencasts that would get virtually anyone up and running on any feature in less than a minute.
You could say that the problem lies with the design/structure of the site or the CMS, or whatever, but it boils down to the common misconception that a CMS is really a CCS (an automagic Content Creation System to get the top Google ranking in 24 hours) and that the web developer is included in the whole package with a very nice .doc-attachment-direct-to-web feature.
BTW: Picked up the CodeIgniter framework for the very reasons stated toward the end of the post.
@Jean
Actually, with Expanse you CAN create custom fields, and much easier than many other systems including Wordpress.
Go ahead and check out the demo at http://demo.expansecms.com/demo
@Keith
I agree with the expensive bloatware out there. Usually those are targeted at the enterprise market where the percieved value is determined by some insane cost. Personally, I would prefer not to rip off customers :)
An extremely clear look at the CMS world. I especially like the idea of a CMS that has to accomodate your needs, not you have to comply with the CMS. Most CMSs in my experience still take the second approach.
The though of frameworks is compelling. Which especially would you recommend. I recently tried EE and was really impressed. It is what I would think of the right approach. Still there is to much to configure for the user in the backend.
I’d like system where you define theme and objects through XML or similar. And only have a backend for content-input. Does anybody have a good recommendation for that kind of needs?
Django: What does your data look like.
Me: Well I have a post that has a title, body, pub-date
Django: Ok, here is your admin tool.
Me: Cool! I also want to store places with name, address, longitude and latitude.
Django: Ok here is your admin tool.
Me: Sweet!
Me: Hey Django, whats if I wanna store a picture or even several with the data?
Oh, and while we are at it, what about contacts, which tend to have data and pictures themselves again?
Django: Ok here is your admin tool.
Nate: No, I definitely didn’t mean to imply that Django was a CMS. It’s not — like you said, it’s an application framework. But, it has a few features (notably automatic admin tool, generic views, and the template language) that make it very well suited to create custom CMSes very quickly.
So, the question becomes: Django (or your favorite framework) may not be a CMS, but if you can use Django to make a CMS that’s ideally-suited for your content just as fast as you can install and customize one of the off-the-shelf CMSes, is that a better option?
The answer, I find, is yes.
Tim Adler: As Nathan implies, Django is well-suited to handle just about any kind of data model you can throw at it.
[…] Take from : thinkvitamin.com […]
Having been involved with enterprise scale CMSs in the past, I often find myself frustrated with the amount of systems out there that call themselves a CMS.
Content management is about the management of data… Yes, you hit it right - anything from pages to mp3s are considered data… But it’s more than that. Scanned documents, content “blocks” - data can be anything from a sentance to a paragraph. But even after that it gets more complex.
How about exporting a content block directly to Quark? Data lifecycle management? What about workflow? What happens if content needs to be approved by a lawyer before it’s published…?
A majority of these systems, you’ll come to realise, are not Content Management Systems at all - at the very most, they are Web Publishing Engines, based for publishing and maintaining web based content.
What I recommend to anyone that wants to build or buy a CMS system is go out and buy a book:
Content Management Bible
Bob Boiko
Its a very eye-opening experience.
-Ryan
Your friendly CMS consultant
Open Source is free, Open Source based CMS not free!
CMS needs documentation in ful for the users.
Keith, great article.
I started out rolling my own admin interfaces for client sites. I was in complete control over my db tables, and how my client interacted with them.
Development time was becoming an issue for me, though and so I began looking for some way to speed up my site development time… Ruby on Rails had just entered the scene, and I was a little leary, so I opted enter the generic CMS world. Over the last year or so I started using TextPattern to power my sites. Did it speed things up for me? Yes, but at a cost. I’ve started having this strange sense that something just isn’t right… I haven’t enjoyed building sites as much. I have totally jammed content into the big baset that is “entry_body” and have lost all the cool, fun ways I used to be able to elegantly interact with those different types of content… because now everything is a mish mash of categorized blog posts.
So thanks for writing this up and pointing me straight. I can feel that nagging monkey sliding off my back again.
You wrote the article that is in my brain. Thanks for getting it out there better than I could have.
There is a big difference in approach when dealing with large enterprise websites. The security issues make large costs, and small websites that have a back-end will have no budget o make their content more secure.
Great article. I’ve been involved in CMS projects for the past 6 years, and I’ve come to many of the same conclusions as you have. I spoke about these issues recently at a local barcamp, and I’ve been trying to expand upon and offer advice on my blog, starting with Better Content Management - Part 1.
Interesting Article I agree with many of his points I have always thought I would build my owing Blog system for myself and will probably do that at some point because I get frustrated with even this tools which is very good. After surveying the free and open source ones out there and looking at the code and said, man they make it so complex with varying coding style and weird organization, I can’t or chose not to work with those. For my present work, I have built our own CMS tools, I had too because all the tools I surveyed out there, free or other wise were too much or too little or not flexible enough or too flexible and required too much training time, or were to complicated to use. I had to create our own internal CSM system at work and add features as time allowed to keep the code simple and the option for future upgrades open. This is how I’ve been doing it sense 1999.
There is one process that most system did not have at the time that was very important to our organization that was an approval process. Some did have it but it was a complex approval process and did not integrate with our AD system, I just built our own. Then dealing with fire wall issues, we do not allow internet access to our custom CMS tools only internal access but some parts of the CMS system need external access like the Calendar tools and such. Most tools did not give us that flexibility they were either all or nothing. So it has been a challenge to make a custom CMS system for our organization but for the most part it fast, every process is the same so I only need to teach a new user one process and the rest is all the same. But it continues to be a challenge to keep up with new technologies such as Ajax and make the UI more and more User friendly.
Thanks for the article.
Give a try to Clever Leap content management system at www.cleverleap.com/content-management/. It is pretty nice solution where you can create content by putting content objects on the page (most common, like blog article, article, photo, text with title… are included). You can create individual content items, even dynamic ones very easy. This CMS doesn’t have tons of features, but it does content management pretty well.
PS: If anybody would like to help with development, I am looking forward…
[…] Here’s a terrific article on on content management and content management systems. And often, the twain don’t meet! Awesome article, Keith! Via Cameron Moll. […]
Keith,
Great article and something that I have been thinking about a lot lately. We recently started using Basecamp as a project management system in many ways this has solved some of our content management issues as it has activated 2 of the 4 ingredients you mention, People & Process. We still need to look at technology side of this and will likely build our own but getting the right people involved in the right process has gone a long way to help. Thanks for you progressive thinking as always.
[…] Redefining content management D. Keith Robinson […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Redefining content management Intressant artikel om hur vi hanterar innehåll i fårhållande till hur vi ser på CMS (tags: CMS Article) […]
Have a read here: how to turn your blog CMS into something more useful.
Go
Interesting article, though I think that most of the problems mentioned have been solved in MODx . It’s a CMS, but also an application framework and it’s very flexible. I’d like to hear what you think of it.
DuthKid - I’m sure MODx is great. However, I think you and many of the other readers who left comments are missing the point. This article isn’t solely about CMSes.
You cannot solve most of these problems with a CMS, a framework or any other kind of technology. The problems with content managment transcend technology. I realize that, given the audience here, technology is of interest, but really, I’m surprised at how quickly the discussion turned from what’s most important to “which framework or CMS is best.”
By the way, on the MODx tip - what the heck is an “Ajax CMS?” I mean “MODx is 100% buzzword compliant, and makes child’s play of building content managed sites with validating, accessible CSS layouts – hence Ajax CMS.” That doesn’t make any sense. I know it goes on to explain, but seriously, explain to me how Prototype and Scriptaculous have anyting to do with common content management problems….
Don’t get me wrong, MODx looks interesting, but, really I wish the people who worked on these projects spent more time talking about how their solutions solves the problems of real people and let time shouting out buzzwords.
I have learnt exactly this the hard way (yet again, this time will be the last).
Working for a client who wanted a blog but with (of course) a view variants on the norm, I got hacking on wordpress. After a day’s work I got too deep in code I didn’t know, and neither would anyone else anymore, that I just scrapped it and started again in Ruby on Rails. In an hour I was in exactly the same position I was in with wordpress but with much cleaner code, many more possibilities, a confidence in my own application, and a fitter happier life.
[…] People will phone you and tell you that you need a Content Management System (CMS). Who will write the content? You? Technology isn’t the be all and end all of this one - think wisely. Redefining Content Management by D. Keith Robinson is a must read before you dance with the CMS devil. […]
Well… I responded to the technical parts in your article because the rest of it seems kind of obvious to me. Of course you need to know who’s going to be in charge of updating content, and of course you need to know what sort of content you want to publish - these are always some of the things I discuss with clients before even starting to work on the website.
To clarify things: I’m not part of the MODx team, I’m just a user. MODx is still a work in progress and it’s clearly not perfect (yet). I agree with you about the ajax text - I suppose this text is addressed to developers rather than users. Obviously ajax isn’t going to solve any of the problems mentioned - but the system itself might. It’s very flexible and allows you to tailor it to fit your content, and not the other way around.
Good article, but I believe your latest comment that the problems that (web) content management transcend technology is perhaps the most valuable comment.
Too often companies that either directly procure content management systems, or procure them on behalf of their clients become focused on technology and therefore derailed by technology led decisions rather than focusing on the end goals of the project. The kind of person that states that they need a CMS written in a c# / python / ruby environment is unlikely to be day-to-day user of the system, and by forcing this route is likely to introduce hurdles before the project gets off the ground.
Condensing (and perhaps misreading?), the article perhaps one lesson stands out above others which often gets put to the side: “It’s about the content, stupid”. Content management without content is a pretty defunct process, which is why I believe you hit the nail on the head with getting the right people onboard, and getting the planning and process of content management addressed before other technical considerations. For those that read this that author / tailor CMS products and have had to deal with requests for hierarchical securities, workflows and roles just to find out at completion that the management of the content is down to xyz in the marketing team who generally fulfils all roles by him/herself must have gone through the frustration by lack of planning (and if they are unlucky enough that they get the frustration of xyz about how complex the commissioned system is).
Regarding typical problems in content management systems, I believe CMS authors could avoid a lot of the pitfalls if they treat content in the same layered approach as most here would treat producing websites. One of yours issues on point two perhaps demonstrates the requirements of the benefits of layered approach, why should a web CMS provide any restriction / controls for CSS? It’s styling, not content and as such it’s arguable as to whether it has any role in a CMS. What is important is the semantic constructs within the content, by making these available and styling appropriately externally to the CMS a better result is achieved, after all it’s then part of the styling the end client has paid for (and it’s unlikely to be in the 72 point red comic sans style that inevitably gets chosen).
Why is this article not telling me anything new? It sums up what the philosophy behind content management is developing *user-centric* tools where technology is a means to an end. The whole focus should be how the author interacts with the content management tool to manage data to its maximum capacity.
One can name development frameworks that can provide the basis to create a lean CMS tool but in reality most CMSs are overcomplicated, are limited in being utterly non-versatile.
[…] Vitamin: Redefining content management Note to self: Blog about this. By now, clients should take for granted that they’re given good advice on not only technical aspects of content management, but how it affects their work and businesses in other ways as well. […]
I think most of the time is the client who falls victim to the vendor’s buzz lines. Free, will cook dinner and wash car. Obediant, will make it easy to do everything you ever dreamed off in web publishing. There’s nothing to learn really, you just copy/paste from Word.
Really…
Currently I am faced with the incredible task of reversing a cms managed web site to static html. Amazingly someone figured out that fethching html templates with 80% of the content manually in place plus dinamic headers and footers was not really fulfilling the vendor’s promise.
Not saying that there aren’t systems that work, but when CMS hacking becomes an art form I preffer to stick to a framework. The confidence in your code and your database design and a the developers community’s efforts just makes it a better day.
Great article, Keith.
Which is exactly why I’ve been standing behind SPIP for several years. It’s very flexible, etc, but I guess I’d stay on the technical side of things, pro’s, con’s, etc.
But what seduced me in the first place is that it’s user-oriented and content-oriented. It never mentions any web-related technical point (database entry, “node”, etc), but always editorial technical points: keywords, news item, articles, categories. It’s built on the idea that group-decision is important, as well as putting content first. The technical constraints are not to be visible from the writer’s point of view, leaving them to concentrate on writing.
The only decision I ever make when using this tool is: is what I’m writing going to be a long-lasting text, with implications and needs to discuss it through the commenting system? OK then it’s an article. Is what I’m writing a short blogmark or a quick thought I want to write down? OK then it’s a news item. How should this be related to that? OK, here’s a new keyword to link them together.
I’ve tried the tool on several publics: internal CMS for a big company, non-profit public CMS, personal website for several publics (my girlfriend and family, who are not tech-savvy), they all found it straighforward. Maybe it’s time CMS’s stopped being written by computer whizz kids and began being though of as ‘for the people who want to write’. Yeah, it’s about the people and content, not about the technology du jour.
Thanks for the article Keith, works fine for a debate!. I work as a designer (not a codee) where we use one “CMS” that is tailored to each application.
My opinion: companies do NOT want yet another computer program to learn. They’d rather outsource it, or if important enough, hire somebody to handle it /lead and editorial team as a full time job. A CMS, no matter how tailored/customized to be the right pill for the client, is still just another thing that will steal time from their real job, and yes - it’s a “program” just like that annoying
CRM/accounting/billing software.
The future lies in web outfits that integrate with their clients, doing everything for them wihout charging stupid rates. Managing a web site is a full time job.
I think some of you guys are missing the point—no amount of tricked out framework-powered custom-admin ajax-display awesomeness is going to write a concise company statement, or select complementary images, or create attractive headings to match article summaries, or maintain a smooth page flow.
As much as I love a well integrated content management system I think it’s hilarious (and sad) that a company will spend thousands and thousands of dollars on a web site and then place an untrained intern or entry-level secretary in charge of maintaining the content.
But Richard, managing your content is a different matter to making sure you have good content to manage.
Keith, thanks for the thought-provoking article. After building hundreds of websites for clients over the years, I can definitely say that most of them don’t understand the total investment needed to succeed on the web. Many of them want to throw money at technology and then say the site is “done” and fail to realize it takes great planning, writing, AND technology to succeed. I find I’m spending more and more time with prospective clients asking them questions about what they’re really trying to do (which they aren’t often able to articulate) before committing to a project with them. They sometimes seem annoyed with the in-depth questioning, but if they can’t endure some up-front analysis, they’re probably going to be disappointed in the end. Same holds true for those who want a CMS to solve the content problem but haven’t planned for the “who” part of getting it done.
I want to echo Ryan’s statement that content management is more than just web publishing and that anyone who has ever spent more than 2 minutes thinking about content management should read Boiko’s book.
I work at a company with more than 60,000 employees and I help manage market research reports that serve a vast and varied audience. We make our information accessible not only through the web, but through redundant network paths, application APIs (a lot of MSFT technologies), and a proprietary desktop tool that connects to the web backend, as well — so those with different access habits are accomodated. The trickiest part is making all this stuff findable (we have more than 30,000 documents in various fileshares). To that end we’ve created separate navigation and taxonomies, and continuously update these. We also work closely with our search team to do proper search architecture and algorithm tweaking.
Keith, you hit the nail on the head by pointing out the people and process are key. Technology is important insofar as it works and properly enables workflow.
I would also argue that there’s one thing that should be addressed in any discussion of content management: destruction of content (this is a process thing). In any good system there are times when content needs to go away — be it because of expiration, legalities, or because it’s mere existence causes unwanted noise (think “organizational unlearning”). In these cases management is important as ever.
[…] Vitamin Features » Redefining content management content management for the web remains a huge pain point for many individuals and businesses. The amount of time, effort and money that’s involved (and often wasted) to do things that are seemingly rather straightforward is astronomical. I mean, how har (tags: content web articles design software management cms) […]
Hello,
I really like this article because it clearly shows how various content (for example a website) should be managed in a business.
I also like your conclusion which put’s what you wrote in a nutshell.
GK
I agree with many of the comments above, that a content management system should be user-centered. Brett’s emphasis o the importance of interviewing clients thoroughly–and often, interviewing the staff or outside users as well–is a key first step in getting to a good custom solution.
However, when profiling my clients, I also ask about the existing skills of the people involved in the hands-on content creation. Depending on the skillset of the users, the ideal system can be very very simple. If they’ve got any development experience–or even if they’re good at following directions–the best “content mangement system” can be a very generic publishing tool like Contribute, a well-commeted HTML file, or an ftp client and a set of instructions. Often, the easiest way to reduce CM cost for smaller clients is to introduce almost no new tools at all. Just build off tools and processes they’re familiar with.
…That should read media, not mediums.
With all due respect, I expected this article to be much more informative than it is. Most of what is said here could be summed up in a couple of paragraphs.
Also:
To what CMS’s are you referring? I don’t know of any expensive CMS’s. In fact the only CMS of the decent ones that costs any money - which also happens to be the best in my opinion - is ExpressionEngine. To my knowledge, all the other widely used CMS’s are free and usually open source.
Your thoughts?
Before I sell a CMS, I always ask: do you have the time and the basic skills to use it? 80% of the time, the answer is no, and my client have just saved hundreds of $ (not to mention time).
I’ve worked with both Wordpress hacked up CMS’s and done a lot of work with Plone - one of the grandaddies of the Content Management world. Plone is huge and at times fantastically difficult to understand (especially with the non-existent documentation!) but it does allow the building of some very specialised sites that allow workflow and strange datatypes to be implemented. It also supports thousands of users really well. That is why Oxfam and Greenpeace use it a lot for their inhouse stuff. I do however agree with the ‘feature creep’ idea from the article. If you don’t need a particular feature (like workflow or revision management) then a good cms should be able to have that part stripped out. The wysiwyg editing in CMSs has got a lot better than it used to. Javascript powered editors like FCK, Epoz and tinyMCE have come a long way in the UI stakes. The key I think is in thinking out from the CMS - the training, the organisational understanding of the purpose and need for the CMS comes so much into play.
http://www.seattle24×7.com/people/bobboiko.htm
Great article. Thanks. What more to say? :)
Personally, I’ve found PostNuke extremely flexible, robust and easy to use. Best of all, free and well supported.
[…] Here’s the funny thing about technology - I’ve mentioned before that technology should help current business processes, and that as far as possible, should not dictate the process. This article that was sent to me got me thinking about that. Short summary, it’s about how content management systems need to be customized to fit the processes, and not the other way round. […]
Good article, I read it a couple of weeks ago, had to come back here and post this comment/question…
I am about to start developing my site, and I’ve looked at all the so called CMS’s out there. It looks like I’ll have to build one myself. My question is this… are there any design principles, such as good/bad practices, or even design patterns tailored to CMS’s?
[…] D. Keith Robinson from BlueFlavor wrote an excellent article on content management for Vitamin. It’s a great overview on some of the client issues related to content management systems and the out-of-the-box solutions. “They’ve got an overly complicated feature-set. With most systems you’ve got a bunch of advanced features that don’t often get used. If they do it’s usually after someone’s spent tons of time learning the system.” “They’re too inflexible. They don’t allow for easy customization (in more ways than one) and require significant resources (time, effort and money) to mold them to what you want.” […]
Redefining Content Management…
Una definizione globale e ragionevole di “Content Management”, libera dall’ansia tecnologica e con uno sguardo alla persona e ai processi. Da leggere l’ultimo post di Keith Robinson. If you’re serious about your content, and you should be, then tak…
[…] På Vitamin finns en bra artikel om hur man ska tänka kring Content Management. Keith Robinson betonar att det gäller att inte tänka CMS, ett system, utan först fundera kring vad man har för innehåll. Innehållet är viktigast. Människor går före system! JeffCroft skriver i samma ärende och betonar hur viktigt det är att veta vad man man ska publicera. Det gäller att tänka igenom vad man ska använda ett verktyg till, och sedan leta efter ett som fyller de funktionerna. WordPress fungerar inte till allt… […]
[…] Excellent article on Content Management over at Vitamin […]
[…] Redefining Content Management […]
I give customers what they want & need. If someone needs content management I install PmWiki (http://www.pmwiki.org ), and call it “a lightweight CMS” because people may ASK for a CMS, but filling out forms in order to create content is bass-ackwards to me. Clicking a link and “just writing” makes a WHOLE lot of sense. Does that mean that’s all they can do with it? No. I program extensions to the package to suit my clients’ needs. I install plug-ins for other functionality. But writing a web page should be as easy as writing a web page and nothing more.
I don’t think it should require rapid programming development tools to create a content management application for a client. I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel, and I believe that rapid development is for proof-of-concept and not flexible enough for a polished final product. That’s my opinion as a programmer, having tried some tools and finding them limiting. If the tools get complicated enough for fine-tuning a site, they lose the very reason they exist in the first place and I may as well go back to programming as opposed to “rapid developing”. So I went back to programming. I’m much happier.
In real life, if you take shortcuts, someone’s getting short-changed.
I am looking to have a website designed with a very professional look. The idea is to create a content management / Social Networking environment for a small business group. The basic concept is sharing personal documents in a Social environment
Any idea’s on where I can begin my search
Thanks
Ryan
Total market is about 40,000-50,000 people
good blog is dead blog:-)…
…
I see I came here little bit late… Well… clients (almost) never have time to change their websites. I try to make them feel “smart” working with CMS, well, my clients are not such big enterprises… so sometimes it works for a while. But at the end they have to change the page (for example News) because it looks bad having old news on the page News… :-)
Roman
..its never to late to read this article.
It`s my second time now, thinking about these words - and now i really understand it.
The process and the technology ist first,
the people second
and than the good content comes alomost alone!
Nice Blog, I’m using toko for content management (it’s a free one)… http://toko-contenteditor.pageil.net
Hi
G’night
Hi, every day I receive this (or other) message:
Dont visit this site - sofa sex
D. Keith Robnison: Redefining content management…
[…]A great article on what content management means to most people compared to what it *should* mean, and some ideas on developing systems (not just *technology*) to make content management work for you.[…]…
I think sometimes that people are mesmerized by the possibilities of technology, and as a result they tend to forget that business is business, and finding ways to utilize technology in your business often means integrating that technology into your business as opposed to doing the opposite. One of the things that’s great about your article is that it applies many common sense business rules to the world of technology, or rather it forces technology to conform to those pre-existing rules. You talk about PEOPLE, and PROCESS, and why it makes sense to define clear GOALS before simply investing in a CMS, but ultimately these things are important in relation to any investment, it’s only that, like kids we tend to be attracted to shiny new things and promises that they will make us happy.
It seems that you’re more of Content Management than CMS. I was looking for a balance as far as your arguments are concerned. For instance, what are the pros and cons for both? You can at least try to touch one aspect for both and see which one works better. In terms of content for instance, you can give us a good comparison between CMS and Content Management.
What can you say about Macromedia Contribute? Nowadays, Macromedia Contribute is a low cost option to allow non-technical users to update the information on their website.
I agree with the idea that content management will be very important in the future.
Nowadays, Macromedia Contribute is a low cost option to allow non-technical users to update the information on their website.
i dont think so.can you send my PM?
I have taken this entire article ( and more articles from thinkvitamin) into consideration when developing my plug and play content management platform. I hope it can be as good as people hope, even though it is far from finished.
Great article by the way. It really opened my eyes.
thanks
There are too many open source CMS written in PHP, Perl, ASP…
but nothing (very complete, like the commercials one) in Java.
this is perfect blog it is very helpful to build my own web site
www.adaotokiralama.com with php
[…] Redefining content management Another look at the complexity of choosing a content management system. […]
oo wey good
I agree with the idea that content
thanks..
Perfect Blog :)
Süper süper cok tskler.
People will phone you and tell you that you need a Conten