Home » Issues » Issue 15

Creating a managed website—Part 2

Focus on the message not the tools. Selecting a CMS, installing it and promoting your site.

Download the whole article as PDF

Short URL: http://fsmsh.com/1551

Write a full post in response to this!


Free software Content Management Systems (CMS) are capable of running most websites these days. Indeed, low initial costs and strong community-based support mean that many sites which can’t afford a proprietary CMS can now benefit from the facilities a CMS provides. In the first part of this article I looked at how a CMS might help and what you need to do to define your site’s target audience and structure. Now I’ll get down to the nitty gritty of selecting a CMS, installing it and setting up and promoting your site.

How do I choose the CMS?

What CMSs are available?

There are a wide range of CMSs available. Wikipedia lists about 130 free software CMSs. CMS Review lists more. CM Pros, a community of content management professionals, is developing a database of CMSs and their features to help narrow down the search, but the best source of up-to-date information about any particular CMS is currently the website for that CMS.

Does the CMS do what I want it to do?

Start by thinking about content creation. If you have a large team who collaborate extensively to create content, and then subject it to rigorous review before publication, then you probably need a fairly sophisticated CMS such as Plone, Apache Lenya, or Alfresco. These are more complex to configure and learn, but they’re more likely to support the workflows and collaboration tools you need.

On the other hand, if one or two of you are running a small site, then a simpler CMS may let you publish content without so many overheads. In this case, something like Joomla, Mambo, openCMS, or Drupal might work for you.

Start by thinking about content creation. A large team, may need advanced workflows. For a smaller team, a simpler CMS may work well

While you’re thinking about content creation, consider the interface for editors. Will they enter everything via a browser, or will some content be created in OpenOffice.org and then imported? If the latter, then ensure tools are available to do it. If the editors also control the formatting and presentation of the content on the site, then the CMS will need to support their formatting tools. If they simply enter plain text and let templates control the rest, make sure the CMS works well in this mode, and that your designers have the right skills to define the templates and style sheets it needs.

Think about other aspects of content delivery too. Do you want to publish to multiple websites, or in a format for mobile browsers? Do you want to support RSS? Do you want to generate features like breadcrumbs? Do you need to put embargoes on press releases or other time-sensitive material? Do you want extra security for some pages? Do you need site search? If so, make sure your CMS supports it.

Don't miss out on the other pages!
123next ›last »

Write a full post in response to this!

Similar articles

0

Do you like this post?
Vote for it!

Copyright information

This article is made available under the "Attribution" Creative Commons License 3.0 available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

Biography

Graham Oakes: Dr Graham Oakes is the principal of Graham Oakes Ltd, a consultancy formed in 2003 to help organisations untangle the complexity within their systems, processes and governance. He helps define business and technology strategies that people will adopt, and then to assure implementation of those strategies. He can be contacted via his web site.

Anonymous visitor's picture

"How do I choose the CMS?" My answer: cmsmatrix.org/

Submitted by Anonymous visitor on Sun, 2006-12-31 18:46.

Vote!
0

"CM Pros, a community of content management professionals, is developing a database of CMSs and their features to help narrow down the search, but ..." vaporware doesn't help today. A free comparator is now available at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

marienoelleb's picture

Technical problems are not the most important ones

Submitted by marienoelleb on Mon, 2007-01-01 22:28.

Vote!
0

Selecting a WCMS for a company, an administration, an non governmental organization or a smaller associative group is fundamentally a computer projet as many others. The main problems are around the objectives and priorities of the project, about the business requirements, about the team managaging the project, about the budget and the deadlines.

It is fundamentally important to clearly understand what type of content an organization wants to communicate, which style of communication it is using and then to determine what ressources are available for the project. Having a plan very clear at this level is absolutely essential. If it is the case, it is possible to rely on existing evaluations, like the one of cmsmatrix in order to shorten the selection of an appropriate solution. If the initial plan is clear and solid, then it is likely that an appropriate solution will be selected. Then, technical problems will have solutions.

I am however a bit surprized by the WCMS quoted by the author of this article. The WCMS module of Alfresco is not yet released, and it is clearly aimed at electronic commerce (from an oral comment of John Powell who visited my employer), which means that it is quite specialized, at least for the next 12 months. OpenCMS, which is a very powerful J2EE based WCMS (and which has been used, for example by EADS) is listed on the same category than Joomla and Mambo. A very popular entreprise WCMS like TYPO3 is not even mentionned.

There is another aspect of the problematic which is not even mentionned by the author. Organizations are progressively integrating their various content management solutions into an Entreprise Content Management facility. Content published trough a WCMS is certainly part of this evolution. This is why the integration between the WCMS of an organization and its Electonic Content Management solution is becoming increasingly important. Although it is not yet mature, this may be a reason why Alfresco will become a very significant actor in this domain in 2008-2009.

Marie-Noëlle Baechler
Belmont-sur-lausanne / Suisse



Two fantastic free software companies that make Free Software Magazine possible:

Other sites

Odiogo