A KISS in time

I’m a firm believer in the KISS (keep it simple stupid) principle. With a content management system (CMS) that means avoiding feature-itis and looking for the simplest system that will get the job done. There is a simple equation to consider. More features = more complexity. The corollary to that is the more complex a system is the less likely it is to get used.

Content management systems run that gamut from very basic to very, very complicated. High end systems usually need a person or department of people to keep them functioning. Such systems are appropriate for large corporations but not for small businesses or organizations. In this context, I’m only discussing server based systems that you administer from a web browser. There are desktop options, too. Those will get covered in another article.

On the other end of the spectrum are roll-your-own systems that struggle to meet even the most basic of needs. Many PHP programming books build some kind of content management system as their learning project. That may be a good way to learn to do web and database programming I wouldn’t recommend such a system for anyone but a programmer who want the satisfaction that comes from building something yourself. For most of us an existing system would best suit our needs.

A CMS appropriate for Mom and Pop can run from free to a few hundred dollars. Free is good. I love free and use a couple of free systems myself. I also think that if a commercial system best fits a particular need it is cheaper in the long run to pay for it. What you need to do is figure out what your needs are.

What features are important?

The very basics

At the very least you need to be able to easily change content on existing pages. Content can include text, images, embedded Flash, audio and video. You also need to be able to add an delete pages easily and have the CMS automatically adjust your site navigation to reflect those changes. I’d pay particular attention to adding images to a page. Some systems make that very easy, some don’t.

Unless you are comfortable with HTML you will probably also want a built in WYSIWYG editor that will allow you to format text and place images in your pages. You will likely have to use a Mozilla based web browser, like Camino or Firefox to take advantage of this feature. Most WYSIWYG editors won’t function fully with Safari or other Apple WebKit based browsers like OmniWeb. This is just a minor point but worth noting.

Many systems have a built in WYSIWYG editor. If they don’t, is possible for a competent web designer to add a WYSIWYG editor to almost any system. So, if a CMS meets your needs otherwise, don’t rule it out for lack of an editor. This speaks as much to selecting a designer as it does a CMS.

Administration

You can go down a checklist and tick of features, but it is much more subjective to evaluate a system’s administration section. I’ll back up here to say that most conten management systems consist of two separate sections. There is the public one that visitors see and a private one where you control the site, add and edit pages, administer users, change site settings an so forth. For me the ease of use that a CMS offers is the make or break decision. Two systems may offer identical features but one is easy to use and one isn’t.

Unfortunately, what seems logical to me may not make sense to you. Fortunately, you can preview a number of CMS’s at Open Source CMS. That only covers free, PHP based systems, so is far from definitive, but it does give a sampling of what is available and a chance to see what you like.

Documentation & user community

The best programmed system in the world is useless if you can’t run it. There are some clever CMS programmers around who offer their wares with no or inadequate documentation. I pass them by. I highly recommend that before you even take the time to “kick the tires” of a CMS that you visit the developer’s site and see what kind of documentation and support is available. Also check to see if there is a list of off site resources.

Typically, you’ll find three kinds of support:

• Formal documentation, including how to install, customize and administer the CMS, is vital. See if there is any and if there is how complete it is. Many developers put up Wikis in the hopes that a community will form that will somehow create documentation for the CMS. Often those will seem to have many pages, but when you actually look you’ll find that pages are empty or have token content. Wikis make nice cooperative documentation platforms, but only if they are used. Also see if the documentation that is there makes sense. If it is written by and to programmers it will be useless for the rest of us.

• User forums are where you will typically get your specific questions answered. Active forums are gold. Check to see how may posts there are and how many answers get posted to questions. Also look at posting dates to see if questions are answered quickly. Forums are not a substitute for documentation.

• Off site documentation, tutorials, themes and add-ons indicate that a CMS has an active community that has grown up around it. Sometimes third party tutorials are better than a system’s official documentation.

Nice to have

All the features mentions so far are pretty standard and should have the simplest sites covered. There are some other features that most people could use.

High on that list is the ability to create sub-pages or sub-categories. Say you have an About US section and want to create several pages in that section like: policies and procedures, history, mission statement, and so on. The ability of a system to handle sub-category pages that group logically related material can make your site much easier to navigate.

Templates

Templates are good. One of the goals of a CMS is to separate content management from web design. The easiest way to do so is to separate design from the logic code in the CMS program. Templates allow you to design or have designed a site that fits your branding needs and add a few extra tags to your template pages that will take the content from the database and insert it into your pages.

Template systems range from very simple to quite complex but the most complicated system I’ve used, WordPress, is still an order of magnitude easier to work with than a system that requires you to edit bits of HTML inserted in the middle of PHP code spread over many separate files like PostNuke.

Another advantage of templating systems is that you have much greater control over how your pages will look. Going back to PostNuke, which is a very capable system, your site will always look like a PostNuke system. Form follows function to a degree but I don’t want my sites looking like they were created by a cookie cutter.

You might want to go even further and have the ability to assign different templates by page, or section of a site. I’m not advocating having every page look radically different but it is handy to have more or fewer columns, color coded site sections, and so on.

User privileges

If you are going to run a site yourself or with one or two people you know well, the ability to manage site users may not be important. Give everyone full access and forget about it. If you want to have multiple contributers it is very helpful to be able to assign just enough site management ability as each person needs.

A site needs an administrator who has full privileges, who can add or control other site users and can control the entire running of the site. Beyond that your needs will vary as will the ability to fine tune privileges. Decide who needs what access to what part of your site and match that against a system’s user management options. I’ve seen a CMS that had 24 levels of administrative system privileges. I can’t imaging needing that fine a grained control but you may.

Multiple content sections

Your main page content generally lives in the middle of your pages. Do you want the same content in all or your site’s side columns or do you want the ability to have page specific, optional content? There is no generally recognized term for these extra content sections. I love them. Some systems don’t offer them.

Extras

There are hundreds of features that different content management systems offer. Many of them are very useful but few are essential to a small website. Check the developer’s site to see if an extra you want is offered as a plugin or module. Each CMS may use a different term for add ons to the system.

Some extras that I find useful are: image galleries, embed Flash, podcasting, file uploads/downloads, visitor comments, RSS feeds (create or import), send to a friend and site maps. One I think is over-used is a sign-in function. Unless you are selling and need to remember visitor information or are running a closed forum, think long and hard before you add a function that can drive visitors away as an unnecessary sign-in will do.

Check the developer’s site to see if an extra you want is offered as a plugin or module. The CMS may use a different term for add ons to the system.

Wrapping it up

This is only a quick overview of CMS basic functions. Whole books can be written on the subject. My strong bias is to find a CMS that is easy to use and offers the minimum features I need.

I’ve built sites for organizations that have big dreams for their sites but found that nobody used their CMS because it was to hard to operate. I’m talking about popular systems here, like Mambo/Joomla, Nuke variants and Drupal. These CMS’s are all feature rich and powerful. I’d also say that they need a very web knowledgeable person running them.

If in doubt, start with a blog. They are stripped down content management systems aimed at offering frequently update content. If you really want the easy entry, use a hosted system like [Blogger])(http://blogger.com}, TypePad or LiveJournal.

If you want more features and control and customizability, WordPress and [Movable Type] have hundreds of add-ons and large, active user communities. Either can be massaged into a pretty capable general purpose CMS.

Some good basic content management systems include: Website Baker, CMS Made Simple and Etomite. After a year of testing systems I chose these three as my favorites. I had my web design students try these three CMS’s out. They found Website Baker to be the easiest to use. But it was only 15 students in the sample and they had all be influenced by my teaching, so it may or may not be a representative sample.

My favorite of the more capable systems is Expression Engine. It isn’t free but very capable. I find it the easiest to set up and use of the more powerful systems. My second choice is the open source Joomla.

If you don’t see your favorite mentioned, don’t feel slighted. There are so many options that it is impossible to test them all.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 16th, 2006 at 2:09 pm and is filed under CMS, Software Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.