Traditional cms

Tables have traditionally been the bane of authors and producers trying to manage structured content or output disability-friendly presentations. Most Web content management users wish their CMS package handled tables better. Part of the problem is that people use tables to represent very different things, and construct them in highly different ways. A nice little primer from Data Conversion Laboratory (a conversion service bureau) outlines the top 10 challenges and pitfalls of converting tables to XML...Read the Primer

Software maintenance fees can really add up. But since maintenance revenue represents a recurring (and therefore highly-prized) income stream, vendors are often loathe to negotiate there. But that shouldn't stop you from asking. In this market, you should at least be able to get to a higher tier of maintenance for a lower published rate. But as an excellent CIO Magazine article (by way of Analysis Zone) points out, you need to be careful about clarifying just what you're buying. CMS vendors in particular have sometimes been less than scrupulous, e.g. labelling upgrades as "new software modules" uncovered by traditional maintenance agreements...Check out the CIO Magazine article

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.

Scripting languages are great for CMS interfaces and quick configurations, but they are generally poor for building large distributed Web content management applications, where more traditional object-oriented, compiled languages like Java excel. Now Sun announces a program to combine the two, working on an interop effort to allow scripting languages like PHP and Python to work natively in a Java server container. We think this could accellerate some very helpful technical convergence in the CMS space...Read about Zend and Sun in Infoworld

Sitecore is a very active Web CMS vendor with a tendency to adopt new technologies and techniques in advance of the rest of the market. As Web CMS Report readers know, in the past this has presented both advantages and problems for their customers.One area where Sitecore has traditionally invested a lot of energy is their user interface. Or, I should say, user interfaces, since there are several different ones. With each new release, the interfaces get slicker, and more powerful, and they demo better to prospective licensees, but customers tell us in actual usage they can quickly get confusing, heavy, and a training burden for all but power users. We've noted repeatedly: slick doth not equal usable (though it might help you become a "cool vendor").So please indulge my skepticism about the latest Sitecore product release, featuring -- almost inevitably -- a "Visually Stunning Interface and Effortless Control

The last of the major independent Digital Asset Management (DAM) vendors, Artesia, has been acquired by OpenText. To some extent, this represents the mainstreaming of asset management -- a traditionally somewhat obscure product segment. However, don't expect asset management facilities to be added to existing CMS products without an additional fee. OpenText has been very hungry lately, but given recent indigestion over other acquisitions, we wonder if it isn't time for them to push back from the table for a while...Read about the acquisition

It was perhaps inevitable that e-forms and content management would begin to converge at some level. For the past couple of years, various CMS vendors -- especially the hosted solutions, but also some traditional software players -- have been offering the ability to develop forms as just one more content type, and even manage the incoming flow of data as yet another content type. Now Ektron joins the fray with its latest version of CMS300, which sports a nifty interface for business users to create forms and then direct the data inputs hither and yon. We didn't see native XML output in this first version, but suspect it is coming...Check out Ektron's form generator

Percussion recently announced a dot-release of its Rythmyx CMS product. Most of the major changes in 5.6 revolve around redressing a traditional weakness of the product: spawning and managing multiple subsites in distributed environments. Good for them...but always test before you buy any product, especially those with "new" features...

RSS continues to flow into the mainstream. The Washington Post's excellent Internet columnist, Leslie Walker, recently wrote a fine synopsis of the growing trend towards syndication news readers. Just when you thought the browser was the universal client, think again. Open source readers like Amphetadesk are spreading fast. Some day IE and Mozilla will subsume this functionality, but until then, there's a whole new audience to reach. The early adopters are primarily techies, but that's changing. So when you look for CMS software, be sure to check out RSS compatibility (both in- and outbound). You say you're not a traditional news firm? Well, remember that syndication has huge possibilities for the broader enterprise behind the firewall too.... Read Walker's Column on RSS Syndication

Swedish developer Peter Krantz has put some WYSIWYG widgets (often known as "rich text editors") to the test, and not surprisingly, they were all lacking in some way, although the list is a bit incomplete inasmuch as it is missing Ektron, still a major player in this space. And you shouldn't take the resulting scores too literally -- some features may matter more or less for you. But it seems like there are some common failings, such formatting nested lists -- a traditional bugaboo in the WYSIWYG world. I was surprised by FCK's low score, but again, it depends on what you test. In any case, as someone contemplating a browser-based CMS, you'll want to test any editors and be sure to set the right expectations among your contributors.