Content Management

Comment: Honestly, in situations like this it’s often best to develop a custom CMS of your own. Of course, this isn’t practical for everyone, but it beats the hell out of paying for an overpriced, bloated “enterprise” CMS (just because it’s “professional grade” doesn’t mean you’re really getting what you’re paying for or that it will make content management any easier for you; more often than not it actually makes things *more* difficult), even if you need to hire outside help to get the job done.

Comment: Hey Mike, I’m with Chris — this sounds like a job for a custom CMS. Build it quick and light, include only the features you need, and tailor it to the job at hand. That’s what we did for a big project I just finished up, and it really helped us meet our goals while keeping the budget manageable.

Comment: I’m always amazed at the ratio of the number of CM systems in the world to the number of CMS tools that actually do what I want them to. It’s something like 40,000 / 0.

I think that the two biggest problems facing CM systems are that they work on adding features rather than improving existing features, and that they’re often designed by software engineers rather than designers. Instead of a tight, smoothly-operating and flexible content management system, we too often wind up with some abomination like PostNuke.

I’ve been using a home-grown CMS for client sites for the past few years, and I’m not sure I’ll ever find an existing third-party tool to replace it, simply because I don’t think anyone will come up with a one-size-fits-all (or even -most) system.

Comment: Everyone wants a custom solution when it comes to content management systems. Drupal is ok, but its hardly a plug in and go CMS.

The Perfect Publsihing + Community Tool

Nope — I’ve done it a few times — in PHP and ASP — MySQL and SQL Server.

The problem is that this approach doesn’t scale — there is absolutely no way a small shop can stay on top of the feature sets that are being commoditized (and therefore expected by even non-technical clients) via open source web app systems like xaraya, drupal, and the like — or even blogging tools like WordPress, Moveable Type, Blogger, MSN and the like.

Much wiser to build the custom enhanced feature sets for your audience inside the framework of an established extensible scalable system.

Creating a PHP-Based Content Management System

For six months in 2004, Intranet Journal’s Peter Zeidman published a tutorial on using the PHP programming language to build a content management system (CMS).

Writing your own CMS can lead to a solution that is better suited to your requirements, better addresses the needs of your users, and is better understood by your development team. If you have the time and expertise to write your own in-house system, it may well prove the better option.

Just adding some food for thought. (whatever that means)

er, I mean using a different color (it sounds so much better without typos)

We’ve got to take seriously the advantages of the open source development model in it’s ability to deliver features and functionality that no full time team of 100+ can — and do it much more rapidly.

I’ve consulted on too many project where we’ve made the mistake of using a custom solution built by a 1-5 man shop (some of which I’ve sold to clients) — when they can’t support the required feature set (which is ever geometrically expanding in the current business environment) or they go out of business — then the project is left high and dry.

Sadly — I’ve seen the cycle unnecessarily repeat itself time and time again — as we pick another small shop and begin painting ourselves into the same corner suing a different color.

With the current availability of solid and scalable open source systems to build on, we shouldn’t be making this mistake anymore.