King's solitude - La soledad del Rey by Manuel Marin via Flickr
Content is king, so it’s no surprise that content management systems have become one of software’s fastest growing industries with hundreds (if not thousands) of offerings. As the primary means for non-technical workers to update a website, web content management systems have become part of the everyday work lives for tens of thousands of employees.
So how do you choose which content management system to run with? Better yet, where should you even start looking?
If you want to make sure you’ve made the right choice, I recommend that you start by outlining the different tiers of content management systems available, and the pros and cons of each. Once you’ve decided on a tier, it will make drilling down to a particular CMS much easier.
Over the next few articles, I’m going to do just that. These articles will be geared to help a business person make a decision on which tier of content management system to investigate further.
NOTE THIS DISCLAIMER! This is not intended to be a comprehensive comparison of the feature/functionality of any particular CMS or CMS’. I’m also not trying to argue one way or another about the validity of content management systems themselves. For these articles, I’m assuming they’re a worthy investment. Let’s just run with that assumption. Maybe someday I’ll write about who really needs a CMS in the first place. That won’t be discussed during these articles.
To start it all off, we really need an operational definition of “content management system” so that we can all understand exactly what I’m writing about. For the purposes of these articles, we’re going to use the term “content management system” or “CMS” to refer to web content management systems like drupal, joomla, concrete5, etc., and NOT true enterprise content management systems like SharePoint and Confluence. The difference between them is that web content management systems only allow users to edit pages on the website, whereas enterprise content management systems help employers manage and collaborate on everything content including documents, spreadsheets, slides, and the website. In terms of a CMS, the basic functionality we’re looking for is a text editor (WYSIWYG or WYSIWYM), Navigation Manager, Form Builders, Template Engine, and File Storage. So, when you’re reading these articles, remember that we don’t mean enterprise CMS systems – so that there’s no confusion.
Now that we’ve defined what we’ll mean by “CMS” for this article, I can list the tiers we’ll discuss in upcoming posts. The different tiers of web content management (at least for my purposes) are commercial proprietary, commercial open source (there is a fine line between commercially backed open source and commercial open source), true open source, and agency or professional services (in house) content management systems.
Check back for the next article and we’ll start discussing the different tiers.
Tags: CMS, Content Management System, planning, strategy, Web Development