November 14, 2006
...With the CMS You've Got...
...Not the CMS You Want.
It's been a really tough day here, getting used to a whole new CMS for one of my clients. It's Windows-only, so that's been most of the frustration. It's been designed for IE 5.5+ (who does that anymore? Really?) and so that means Parallels and Virtual PC for my clients. Parallels, so far, has been a real treat because it's absolutely transparent. Virtual PC, though, is a real dinosaur. 10-15 second response time for clicking a button in a web interface totally sucks and you lose all your momentum navigating the interface.
What I really want to see in a CMS is this:
It's gotta be accessible. That means Firefox support, Safari support & IE support. If you want to get crazy, add in Opera and mobile phones. You need JavaScript, so wap devices are totally out.
It's got to be easy to move elements around. Some of that may mean using something like AJAX to make that possible. Remember: you're designing the CMS to be used by staffers, not web developers, not programmers, not IT guys. You have to design the system to match the audience.
It's got to be non-destructive. One of the things that drives me nuts about this WMS is that in order to change the links on the lefthand side, you need to pick on that's going away, copy and paste the critical elements into their lower locations (URL from Link 2 to Link 3), etc. It's a giant pain. All I should have to do is create a new pairing, and it should just take the top three links. Make them positionable with precedence options available.
The process can't be prohibitive. It took us four hours to add two pages today. Part of that is Virtual PC. Part of that is learning the system. Most of that, though, is related to the inefficiency of the system in question. The system has to be really efficient, or it's going to sap the will to live of any content manager.
Is it out there yet? I'm not sure. Wordpress is good, but not robust enough. Movable Type is good, but I've seen the weight of a large site in MT, and it's a nightmare eventually. Even TypePad suffers a bit. What else is out there that can handle large sites?
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About Tom Bridge
Tom Bridge is an itinerant technologist, media specialist and writer in Northern Virginia. His web presence dates back to the mid 90s and his early attempts were sadly captured by the internet archive. He is the City Captain for Metroblogging DC, a weblogger in the O'Reilly Weblogging Network, an editor emeritus of MacSlash, and a contributing editor to About This Particular Macintosh. He is a Mac user through and through and brags that he hasn't had to use a PC since 2001.
Contact
Available via email at tom_bridge@mac.com or via Instant Messenger at DrC2k (AOL) or via telephone at +1.571.243.3135. Remember, Eastern Standard Time unless otherwise noted herein.
Other writings
- Metroblogging DC
- O’Reilly Weblogging Network
- TomAndTiff.com
- About This Particular Macintosh