Veen on CMS
September 29, 2004 | 
14 Comments
Do you ever read something that makes you shiver because it’s so close to your own view on something? This is how I felt when reading Christine Perfetti’s interview with Jeff Veen. He says:
For many companies, they should probably never consider installing a CMS. After looking at the resulting implementations of dozens of CMS packages, it’s pretty clear these systems are grossly bloated with complex features few sites need.
He goes on to talk about how many Web sites should be viewed as publications, as opposed to software implementations, and run accordingly. I couldn’t agree more. It’s a great interview.
I saw Veen speak last year at SXSW and I enjoyed it greatly. Anyone attending UI9 should make a point of checking out the session he’s hosting with Peter Merholz.
Filed under: News
Comments
1. Sheldon Kotyk said:
I agree, CMS systems are too complex to configure for every site. At TruthMedia the time we recommend a site to go into a CMS is when there is more than one individual updating content or when the site has become too big to do a sitewide update in Dreamweaver.
We have spent the last 2 years customizing our Interwoven TeamSite systems and are just at the point where we can setup a new site in less than a week.
Unless you have lots of money to pay a consultant to do your customization for you, or lots of time to do it yourself, stay away from an enterprise level CMS.
Posted on September 29, 2004 03:17 PM | #
2. Jeremy Flint said:
Another drawback to CMS is that many of them have a poor implementation (if any) of web standards.
I have seen many sites that have a huge backend CMS to add a new press release every other month. Its like dropping a v8 engine into a Yugo.
Posted on September 29, 2004 03:20 PM | #
3. Scott said:
Some of my friends think PHPNuke is awesome, I just want to hit them =P. I like how Zeldman hand rolls all of his publications, that’s love and dedication right there.
Posted on September 29, 2004 03:39 PM | #
4. Jason said:
Yes, I seem to remember shivers down my spine when reading Give The Web Some Respect. Hit too close to home.
Posted on September 29, 2004 03:57 PM | #
5. Scottyo said:
For years now I have been trying to convince the university I work at to adopt a content management strategy. It always inevitabley becomes the convuluted expensive monster described in the interview. I think the last batch of numbers we were throwing around were in the 2-3 hundred thousand mark. That is ridiculous for a university with enrolment at 4 thousand.
I think what happens in a lot of cases is that you have all these legacy systems that in some way contribute to the content that ends up on the web and everyone wants that to be integrated into a CMS. Then you get into discussions about Portals, and security and so on and soon updating content becomes lost in the meetings after meetings about “what is a portal?” and “should we have one?”
I am leaning towards Macromedia’s Contribute software now. It’s simple, requires no server side configuration except sFTP which is fairly common, and it operates much like a Word processor or web editor that most site trustees are used to anyway and its cheap. A couple hundred copies of it and some training for less than 25K is pretty good compared to the monumental task mentioned above.
Posted on September 29, 2004 09:20 PM | #
6. Rogier said:
Ghe he, that is so true!
But you do have to make a difference between a portal system (such as PHPNuke) or a CMS.
There’s a place and time for both of them.
Posted on September 30, 2004 12:34 AM | #
7. Tom said:
Jeff said:
“My most-frequent response to this question is, “What’s the absolute least you can get away with?” Initially, teams should get the super-simple solution working and, only then, start adding complexity.”
What do you then do when the complexity won’t “snap on” to the simple solution? Do you start all over again - which would be a waste of resources to say the least.
We’re struggling with this at ServiceMaster (Well, I’m struggling with it.) We’ve bought into BEA’s Weblogic 8.1 platform (we’re currently on 7). Part of which is “Weblogic Portal.” You can see where this is going. We’re going to move our new intranet to this portal software. It’s big and bloaty and uses tables for modules.
It has a workflow process, versioning, lots of snap ins, plug ins and on and on. Guess what we do on our intranet? Publish documents…and have one or two forms.
I tried to suggest a simpler approach only to be rebuffed at every attempt. The problem is we do have some sort of need for a robust solution in some respects. Example: They want to share the information on the corporate portal to all the brand portals - based on permissioning. Granted, I can’t do that with a blog solution or even a lot of simple CMSs.
Granted some of these software solutions are not geared toward a publishing issue, but there is usually more at stake than just publishing. (If not, then I side with Jeff.) It’s easy to oversimplify some of these issues then get caught with your pants down with the engineers chuckling in the corner.
We actually DO need versioning, workflow process, content sharing and the ability to have content authors who can add and edit content. There is more going on here than a simple publishing solution. Whether this is an enterprise-specific problem or not, I’m not sure. I’m rambling now, my point is simply a lot of times a simple publishing solution sounds great and clean on the surface but doesn’t really solve your real, deep down problems.
Tom
Posted on September 30, 2004 04:52 AM | #
8. Jay Jones said:
Keith,
I attended a Veen seminar here in Grand Rapids on Information Architecture, and we were able to chat briefly about this same issue.
What we have decided to do was build a component based, home-rolled CMS that allows us to literally drag components into an admin folder, add a tag to a page and, “voila”, that page has a company-controlled area to update themselves… whether it’s news items, activites and events, etc.
While this wouldn’t fit for most larger companies that actually do require a full-blown CMS, it’s working well for us.
Personally, though, I have been enjoying building TextPattern-based sites and handing over the controls to my clients. It’s a beauty for things like that.
Posted on September 30, 2004 06:59 AM | #
9. Dave Foy said:
It’s for these reasons I often recommend and install Big Medium (http://www.globalmoxie.com) for many clients. It’s cheap, it outputs standards-compliant code, and acts like a publishing system, which is exactly what most clients need.
Highly recommended! And no, I don’t work for the company : )
Posted on September 30, 2004 10:23 AM | #
10. Bronwyn said:
I wonder if a good, full-featured wiki such as PmWiki or TWiki would work for many organizations. They’re undoubtedly simpler than ECMS, and you can’t beat the price. They have at least some features desired by Tom, like versioning, multiple authors, and page drafts. Some are built-in, some are plugins.
Another two free options that might bear some looking at would be Bricolage and Typo3.
Posted on September 30, 2004 11:55 AM | #
11. Keith said:
Jay – Sounds like you’ve got a good solution. I also have been interested in textpattern for this stuff.
I’m not sure if everyone reading this knows it, but at the hospital where I work we used to have a full blown CMS. We ditched it for the very reasons Jeff talks about.
We now run 85% of our intranet and quite a bit of the areas we need distributed authorship on our external sites via Movable Type.
Don’t underestimate the power of blogging software for this stuff. In many cases what a client (like our own at the hospital) needs isn’t a CMS at all – it’s simply distributed authorship.
I’ve been planning a post about this, will get that up soon I promise.
Posted on September 30, 2004 12:12 PM | #
12. Ray said:
Jay, I’m glad you brought up Textpattern. As I read Christine’s article and the comments I couldn’t help but think… “I should mention Txp”.
Textpattern (www.textpattern.com) is a standards compliant, light weight open source CMS spearheaded by Dean Allen of Textism.com. Written in PHP on a MySQL DB Textpattern is fast and efficient. Adding content to a site is a breeze, even for people who only feel comfortable sending an email (the “type and hit send” crowd).
I understand and agree that most CMS packages are bloated, ugly and expensive products that belong on the same shelf as greasy fat foods but I also believe most companies DO need a CMS to manage their online documents/content, if for no other reason than getting everything into a database. In the next couple of years I see bogging software like Txp and MT filling the void created by current “high end and expensive” CMS packages.
With open source projects like Textpattern coming to the surface and more public awareness on standards, bloated CMS packages will soon be a thing of the past ; ) XML-based web development is slowly becoming main stream (did I say slowly). Once that hits… who wouldn’t want a standards compliant, light-weight CMS to manage and store their content?
Posted on October 1, 2004 09:52 AM | #
13. grayrest said:
I’ve been working on this for years. I have the additional requirement of it being free. I’ve come to the conclusion that a wiki that can handle dynamic pages would be ideal. I haven’t done much with it, but I believe Rhizome to be an extremely cool system, especially for the content-heavy sites that I tend to build. Other wiki systems I’ve tried just aren’t flexible enough.
Posted on October 3, 2004 05:47 PM | #
14. Steven Zussino said:
I am a strong advocate of PostNuke. It is fairly secure and with the open-source community releasing new modules each week and themes it is bound to improve. It is tough to find a CMS that meets all the clients needs but I find this is the ideal solution for most of them.
Posted on October 9, 2004 09:53 PM | #
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