Easy to use cms

CMS Watch is frequently -- and I think justifiably -- critical of Vignette's "VCM" web content management platform (c.f., my review of their new management interface). But in fairness, there is one thing that the product does fairly well, though it's not always easy to get a handle on it. Here's what it is. After a history of poor metadata and taxonomy support, Vignette implemented a real classification system on top of its traditional "channels" motif of binding content items to your site hierarchy. Also, editorial teams can organize content items into arbitrarily-structured "projects" on the back end. Combined, these three ways of organizing content can be quite useful.

James Robertson's Step Two Designs maintains a useful list of Aussie CMS vendors. Some of them are international, but at least 50 of them are native to Australia. No one can say for sure how well they are all doing, but the depth of the list suggests how easy it remains for consulting firms to get into the content management game with their own CMS applications, especially at the low end of the market. Of course, winning the game is an entirely different matter...Peruse StepTwo's List of Aussie CMS Vendors

StepTwo's James Robertson has identified 11 usability principles for CMS products. I would quibble that some of his rules are actually more situational rather than universal. But if you care about actual user adoption, this is a great starting place. Note the running theme about task-specific user interfaces. These actually aren't always very easy to build (and most default product "wizards" are mortally deficient), but as we pointed out in the most recent Web CMS Report, some vendors are beginning to provide better facilities for creating custom interfaces. Remember, poor adoption = poor ROI, so modifying interfaces for essential simplicity may be the most critical project investment you make.

The (very fine) cmf2006 conference in Denmark that ended yesterday was capped a Web Idol competition, where 5 Web CMS vendors competed head to head with 6-minute demos. Each vendor claimed their system was easy to use, but among them had 5 very different interfaces. Lesson: if you want "easy," you'd better articulate just what you think that is. Also of note was the coupled management-delivery architecture at work among all 5 contestants. In the mid-market, website management is certainly come in vogue -- but as we've outlined elsewhere, buyers need to understand the cost, security, and performance implications of putting a CMS in their delivery tier, especially for public-facing sites.

After carefully controlling your site design through cascading style sheets (CSS), wouldn't it be a shame to lose some of that power and flexibility when implementing a CMS? Sadly, many content management solutions don't make it particularly easy to integrate style sheets, either on behalf of designers or authors. Noted information architect Victor Lombardi has written a nice primer on how to manage style sheets within a CMS. In what he describes as a "presentation management subsystem" (with the unfortunate acronym, PMS), Lombardi lays out different approaches to both managing and applying styles within a structured Web CMS. It's a short, easy, and useful read -- and note some of the reader comments about the vagaries of WYSIWYG editors and maintaining styles...Read "Integrating CSS with Content Management Systems"