By:
Ben Herrington
on Thursday, January 01, 2009,
under
CMS
I'm learning a new content management system these days. Again.
[sigh]
In the past 10 years I've suffered through
discover/design/develop/deploy of a CMS 6 or 7 times, depending on
how you want to define a CMS. Some have been OK, and some have been
horrible. None have been great.
That's probably an exaggeration: Any CMS that can allow me to
add, edit, style or delete a page without having to [code] is
great. This very website, I recall, was built in Dreamweaver in
2001 with Eric Meyer's Cascading Style Sheets at my right
hand. (Painful long hours of poring through styles to try to figure
out: why won't that [UL] tag intend in IE the way I want?) Anything
is great compared to that.
But compared to what a CMS ought to be able to do, none have
measured up.
Rhythmyx worked OK, but it was slow and had little
idiosyncracies introduced by a programmer just doing what I asked
him to do. (I know, Doug, you warned me.) Sitecore was easier to
use -- nicely intuitive interface -- but even slower. SharePoint
was, and still is, baffling and aggravating to me as an end-user.
WordPress is fast and easy, but not much good beyond posting a
simple blog. This site is managed through Joomla! (I love the
hubris of the exclamation point) and it's pretty OK -- lots of
extensions, passionate user base, solid code, but ... still not
exactly what I'm looking for.
What am I looking for? I want to:
- See my site from the back side in a tree view that more or less
matches the site's hierarchy.
- Preview any page before publishing. (You'd think that would
come standard out of the box, but Rhythmyx never did do that
right.)
- Add new functions, like reader comments (coming soon to this
site), without dragging in a developer.
- Add new content snippets, like "Join our newsletter", across
multiple pages without a lot of tedium.
- Change content quickly.
So this time it's Umbraco. So
far, Umbraco seems remarkably easy to use. It is based on
well-known UI metaphors and with a minimum of visual noise. It
shows my site's pages in a tree view, just like in Windows
Explorer. To create new pages, I can right-click the parent page,
and to edit a page's content I simply select that page. In that way
it's like WordPress. But unlike WordPress, it also has advanced
role-based security, a pretty muscular WYSIWYG editor (which has
been an aggravation with every CMS I've used), digital asset
management, and a flexible notification system.
And so far our developers like it, too -- no, it's too early to
say that. Let's say they are cautiously optimistic. Like me,
they've been burned a time or two chasing the CMS dream.
So stay tuned. As this comes together, I'll let you know what we
discover.