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My Rant For Content Management System
Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 2:54 am
by jimthunderbird
Just finished another projects for the client...
I finally came to a point where I find out many of the open source content management systems out there are merely website publishing systems. They are actually promoting their own deisgn pattern and, as I feel, suffer from the problem of over-engineering.
What a nice idea! A solid core + loaded of plugs! But in reality, it's not the case.
Content Management is a process run by the business, not developers.
Jeffrey Veen wrote about this in
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publication ... 000315.php
PHP, MySQL and Javascript already has many good APIs to do all that stuffs, why reinventing the wheels?
I took a look at drupal, I feel drupal will eventually grow to a "linux-like" creature with hords of modules and APIs. It turns out that a developer need to learn another set of APIs in order to use it, the time spent on it will become more and more and eventually less efficient than just writing code in php.
I took a look at smarty, what a nice idea! We can seperate business logic with presetation logic! But, php itself is already doing that! Smarty will have more and more "tags" and in order to use it, we need to learn another language.
I think cascading style sheet is a the better way than smarty, seperate the style with content...
Finally, all of the words above are just "rant", and maybe completely wrong, they just reflect my current thoughts.
Hope to hear from your comments...
-- Jim
Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 5:42 am
by onion2k
Drupal is a framework, Smarty is a template engine. Neither are content management systems.
Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 7:10 am
by Ollie Saunders
Yeah CMSes don't tend to have APIs other than for writing extensions. I have to admit I always thought Drupal was a CMS.
So far in 2 years of web development I've managed to avoid both smarty and any content management system. Instead I use the Zend Framework and write Object Orientated code. Recently I've started using XML and XSLT which, together makes one powerful templating system.
Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 8:44 am
by Jenk
I've always viewed CMS' as glorified Frameworks.
Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 9:35 am
by onion2k
A content management system is a finished product. It's an application for managing* the content of a website. It's got nothing to do with coding. It's for non-coders to use.
* I've mentioned before that content management systems never actually allow users to "manage" anything, merely edit stuff.
Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 10:10 am
by Jenk
But in context, it is a base to create applications/websites from. Ergo, a framework.
That's my view of it.
Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 11:03 am
by RobertGonzalez
CMS' are systems that allow the management of content. Whether that content is in the form of a blog, page maker, site maker, press releaser, etc, the fact is that the purpose of a CMS is to allow folks that have no knowledge of web authoring to author web material. In my opinion, Mambo is a CMS. Drupal, as has been stated already, is a framework.
Smarty is a templating system that allows for the 'pretty' separation of logic and presentation. And you are right, PHP natively does that. But it is not as 'pretty' as a lot of designers would like (note, I said designers, not programmers/developers). As for reinventing the wheel, well, if the wheel doesn't perform as you would like, and you have the ability to remake a wheel that does, then why the heck not reinvent the wheel, in a way that meets your needs as a wheel user?
Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 10:22 pm
by Trenchant
onion2k wrote:* I've mentioned before that content management systems never actually allow users to "manage" anything, merely edit stuff.
That isn't always the case. Whenever I design a CMS specifically for a clients website is is 100% integrated. Everything runs off the CMS and after the cores done I build the sites with my own CMS. In a lot of cases it actually saves me work.
Many systems include tools to add, remove, redesign pages. Its not hard if the website is built for the CMS.
Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2006 3:00 am
by onion2k
Web Dummy wrote:onion2k wrote:* I've mentioned before that content management systems never actually allow users to "manage" anything, merely edit stuff.
That isn't always the case. Whenever I design a CMS specifically for a clients website is is 100% integrated. Everything runs off the CMS and after the cores done I build the sites with my own CMS. In a lot of cases it actually saves me work.
Many systems include tools to add, remove, redesign pages. Its not hard if the website is built for the CMS.
Adding, removing and editting pages is content editting, it isn't content management. Content management is a well designed document workflow with appropriate sign offs from various different parties, an established production calendar, asset management, etc. A system that's integrated into a site so that users can change stuff whenever they want is actually an anti-management system in my opinion.
Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2006 4:30 am
by matthijs
Adding, removing and editting pages is content editting, it isn't content management. Content management is a well designed document workflow with appropriate sign offs from various different parties, an established production calendar, asset management, etc. A system that's integrated into a site so that users can change stuff whenever they want is actually an anti-management system in my opinion.
Well said!
Posted: Thu Nov 23, 2006 11:33 am
by alex.barylski
matthijs wrote:Adding, removing and editting pages is content editting, it isn't content management. Content management is a well designed document workflow with appropriate sign offs from various different parties, an established production calendar, asset management, etc. A system that's integrated into a site so that users can change stuff whenever they want is actually an anti-management system in my opinion.
Well said!
Ditto

Posted: Thu Nov 23, 2006 8:49 pm
by freefall
onion2k wrote:Adding, removing and editting pages is content editting, it isn't content management. Content management is a well designed document workflow with appropriate sign offs from various different parties, an established production calendar, asset management, etc. A system that's integrated into a site so that users can change stuff whenever they want is actually an anti-management system in my opinion.
Yes
Content management is a well designed document workflow with appropriate sign offs from various different parties
No
an established production calendar
asset management
Because you have mixed these I would say you are thinking of a framework.
Real world example:
Company A comes to me and says:
We are installing a CMS for 1000 people to use and 150000 to read on our website.
Our website will have a webshop with an estimated 10000 purchases a day.
We will have a user registration system that has to register and manage people who are:
customer
internal
subsidiaries
management ranks
Now. We knew we needed a framework and the cms they were using was a framework by virtue of its design. So we built the webshop and registration system seperately and integrated them together and bam a very nice a manageable/modular and seamless solution.
If they had asked us: we need to integrate our asset management system we would have done so, but again n the same context. It would and can never be considered part of a cms.
It is an evolution of the cms systems of the last 10 years in combination with the progressive thinkers of designers that has resulted in us realising that 99% of the time the cms drives your site. For another example look at the growing trend of commerce applications like oscommerce/zen cart. 8 years ago a commerce application was a catalogue, shoppng basket, payment screen that you wrote your connectivity to early worldpay etc...now we have these all singing all dancing commerce apps that you could actually run a whole site off.
Due to sites like this and the greater knowledge in the development world people are basing their products on ubiquitous frameworks that are able to encompass so many more purposes than just their 1 core function. Perhaps it has come about through needs in the market, but then we all know us nerds and geeks drive that anyway.
Re: My Rant For Content Management System
Posted: Thu Nov 23, 2006 8:59 pm
by freefall
jimthunderbird wrote:Just finished another projects for the client...
I finally came to a point where I find out many of the open source content management systems out there are merely website publishing systems. They are actually promoting their own deisgn pattern and, as I feel, suffer from the problem of over-engineering.
What a nice idea! A solid core + loaded of plugs! But in reality, it's not the case.
Content Management is a process run by the business, not developers.
Jeffrey Veen wrote about this in
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publication ... 000315.php
PHP, MySQL and Javascript already has many good APIs to do all that stuffs, why reinventing the wheels?
I took a look at drupal, I feel drupal will eventually grow to a "linux-like" creature with hords of modules and APIs. It turns out that a developer need to learn another set of APIs in order to use it, the time spent on it will become more and more and eventually less efficient than just writing code in php.
I took a look at smarty, what a nice idea! We can seperate business logic with presetation logic! But, php itself is already doing that! Smarty will have more and more "tags" and in order to use it, we need to learn another language.
I think cascading style sheet is a the better way than smarty, seperate the style with content...
Finally, all of the words above are just "rant", and maybe completely wrong, they just reflect my current thoughts.
Hope to hear from your comments...
-- Jim
Jim, you have just relayed the ultimate irony. What we're doing is creating sub-proprietry systems that need their own specially trained
drones.
Tags were all the rage 5+ years agi and they seemed great and we've ended up with things like templating. What does templating do? Allows flexibility to someone without programming knowledge. Does it? Does it really? No. It may only take a monkey to know what brick to place where but wow, does sharon in sales know what brick is what? no...does dave the dev? He could guess and spend time with the manual....but see you're right. 3 or 4 years ago when thebig push for cms occured the big word was leverage, all these systems do is the opposite. They add a layer of so called simplicity over a a layer that you probably already have the skills for. And to what end? Flexibility? Maybe over the course of 10 years (and your cms will never last that long anyway) Sharon might have made enough changes at less cost than Dave the Dev to make it worth while.
Re: My Rant For Content Management System
Posted: Fri Nov 24, 2006 3:36 am
by onion2k
freefall wrote:What we're doing is creating sub-proprietry systems that need their own specially trained drones.
If your content editting system requires training then it's too complicated.
Re: My Rant For Content Management System
Posted: Fri Nov 24, 2006 4:26 am
by Chris Corbyn
onion2k wrote:freefall wrote:What we're doing is creating sub-proprietry systems that need their own specially trained drones.
If your content editting system requires training then it's too complicated.
This is pretty much the idea we keep at the front of our minds when we develop the system I work on full time. Teachers use it. Teachers are just far too busy to learn yet another system for use in school. Keep it simple. Even if you have to stick gaping big ugly bits of text on the screen, just do it. Being able to develop intuitive interfaces is a very valuable skill in itself.