Seth Gottlieb over at Enter Content Here has a very good, succinct post on choosing a content management system (CMS). Don’t know whether this topic is getting some recent traction because people are trying to spend money at the end of the fiscal year or planning to spend money next fiscal year.
I think an important note for people to remember, (but not necessarily addressed in this post) is that it’s all about the business, not the technology. Cost of ownership of any CMS, over 3-5 years, needs to be included in the choosing process. It’s easy to jump to “how” to manage your content. But the driving force should be the “why” do you want to manage your content? Technology is not a solution. It is only a means to an end.
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I’ve never been a big fan of content management systems for several reasons:
- as mentioned, they’re often used to solve problems that have nothing to do with content management.
- you tend to see a lot of extra CMS features enabled where there’s no natural “fit” for them (e.g., just because your CMS makes it easy to add a chat room to every web page doesn’t mean that every web page should have a chat room).
- I see far too may recognizable content management systems. A CMS should be invisible to the end user, not instantly identifiable (for whatever reason).
I guess those aren’t really problems with the actual CMS… just with how people choose to use them.
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