I think we can safely say that the last two week have been quite lively for Alterian Content Manager, as after an incubation with partners, customers and analysts we took our product strategy and roadmap to the social web. I’ve tweeted, interviewed, commented, posted and now (finally) blogged our message to the CMS community – [...]
Forgive the cheesy title, but yes I gave a presentation at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising (TfMA) show last week where I talked about the place of content and in web or digital engagement. Or as marketing put it in the show guide synopsis: ”The importance of good content management and governance as a [...]
The perennial “what is a CMS” debate broke out this week, with a fairly innocuous tweet from Dirk Shaw, “I am sorry but wordpress is hardly a web content management system.” that many of our CMS community waded into and included this post on CMS Myth arguing in favour and just about everyone arguing against… and crikey [...]
Integrating Microsoft ASP.NET into RedDot CMSIs it easy to integrate .NET into your RedDot CMS project? Yes it is, if you know how and obey some simple rules. This article gives you a best practice on how to include any .NET functionality for your published website within your RedDot CMS templates.
Inline code within a content class can’t be versioned as it could be with a version control system when developing standard .NET solutions outside of any CMS. You can’t develop or test properly using inline code within the CMS. Whenever you have to change the .NET part of your project you would need a RedDot Consultant or some of their knowledge and hence your project doubles up on resources. Don’t integrate inline code within your CMS.
There is a clear understanding of what your CMS should handle for you – your content – and what it should not take care of – styling and dynamic functionality may it be Javascript, .NET or any other scripting technology. The CMS is your data storage and management layer, the web server is your presentation and visualization layer and hence it is the point where dynamic functionality, styling and user interaction takes place. By keeping those parts separate you ensure to have a stable, scalable and furthermore easily maintain- and upgradeable Content Management Solution. Read more on this topic here
Instead of just adding a page directive followed by your inline code you should use user controls. Given that your code will be used on your website and not within the Open Text CMS ASP.NET User Controls are the best way to embedded dynamic functionality within your project.
There are basically two points where .NET is included in your template. The first one needs to be in every template which uses User Controls unless you integrate it using a container. The second one works as placeholder for the .NET functionality:
<reddot:cms><if><query valuea="Context:CurrentRenderMode" operator="==" valueb="Int:2"><htmltext> <%@ page language="C#" %> <%@ Register Src="~/UserControls/Search.ascx" TagName="Search" TagPrefix="uc" %> </htmltext></query></if></reddot:cms>
This example references a code behind file for a search used on the web server. It is placed in the top of every page instance created with this template. This way you only have to integrate the .NET reference once in each template. You can break it down to once per project if you use a container approach.
<body>
<div id="site">
<div id="header">
<reddot:cms><if><query valuea="Context:CurrentRenderMode" operator="==" valueb="Int:2"><htmltext>
<uc:Search ID="Search" runat="server"/>
</htmltext></query></if></reddot:cms>
This is the ASP.NET User Control for your search interface. Since you don’t run the search inside of your CMS project we have used a Render Tag to exclude this block from showing up within the CMS. If you want to be fancy you can put some placeholder content here by using a different Context:CurrentRenderMode block where you use valuea=”Context:CurrentRenderMode” operator=”<>” valueb=”Int:2″ to show HTML code only on the CMS server, you can read more about this here.
By following the example above whenever you have to update your .NET code you just have to change your .ascx file, there is no need to touch or even deploy the .ascx file to the CMS server. There is an approach of using the built-in .Net folder within RedDot CMS but since you might as well just upload your files manually I dare to say – Why bother? Ok, you should bother in a clustered server system where you publish to multiple publishing targets, but for a simple one CMS one web server setup you might as well just stick to manual deployments.
In RedDot we are able to insert User Control tag into any area of a page. If you have to influence settings or content areas you can use several ways to generate content and integrate those within .Net applications. You can use XML files published by RedDot CMS or user attributes with inline edited content to changed and/or edit properties. Those can be passed through to your User Controls. No need to use the CMS as IDE for your .NET solutions, keep all parts of your project separate and everything is just fine.
Are you interested in how to integrate CSS files within the CMS? Read this article here or on a high level understanding and “how to” for CSS and CMS in general this article here.
How do you integrate ASP.NET in your RedDot CMS projects?
Read more RedDot CMS best practice articles here.
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I’ve recently been working on a number of web content management system selections. My preference is to carry these out in a two-stage process (see the one-sheet guide to selecting a WCM). The first stage pre-qualifies suppliers according to client attitudes to cost, risk and technological preferences. The second stage then gets into the real tasks that you want to perform, discovering how the WCM enforces and informs processes.
Like most other people in this business, I approach this from the point of view that there is no best WCM, just different products that may be viable for different kinds of tasks. It’s about finding a product that will allow you to get started as quickly as possible without precluding later ambitions. I try to show clients what a WCM could do for them, and in turn client aspirations suggest product features. These usually centre around a number of core areas:
How is content updated? Is it through a browser, a document template, or some other application? If it is through a browser, which browsers does it work in? Does it require a plug-in? How viable are those constraints within the organisation? If the organisation is planning to devolve editing, how appropriate are WYSIWYG and in situ editors? If content entry needs to be more controlled via forms, how will users preview their work? Can the WCM offer different editorial interfaces for different types of users? And hand in hand with the interfaces, if you have lots of devolved editors, how does the WCM assure concurrent contribution and secure access for different kinds of users?
Some WCM only really have the concept of pages and associated assets, making it hard to re-use fragments of content across the site. This simple model is generally appropriate for two scenarios: where there are many devolved, occasional contributors who would be confused by having to perform multiple tasks to get a piece of content to update on one part of the site and wouldn’t immediately understand the implications of a more complex editorial change; and for sites which have quite user journeys with little information appearing in more than one place.
For sites which need to re-use content a lot, where there’s a central editorial team assuring that changes are propagated correctly, more advanced systems that use “fragments” of content in multiple locations across the site in an “edit once, publish many” model can bring significant business benefit. These content management models usually bring more flexible templates but they can also make it more difficult to audit content: what did a given page look like on a specific day and who made the content changes? They are also reliant on robust link cohesion, so that if you move a piece of content, the WCM continues to link to its new location.
Absolutely central to most WCM is the concept of a content type. This is the model that allows you to define which fields editors need to complete to publish a page and the constraints on those: e.g. title (no more than 200 characters), summary (plain text), main body text (rich text), location (postal code), category (list of valid values), etc. These structures are important for a number of reasons. They allow you to create business rules for linking content, such as get me the three latest news items about Germany. They allow you to create different presentations for different types of content, so am event looks completely different from an FAQ. And they allow you to contol which information must be completed before content can go live and how it will be presented on different platforms once it’s been published.
There are other metaphors that WCM use to relate complex content: hierarchical metadata structures such as folders, categories or channels enable you to group content together in more complex ways. Flatter metadata structures also allow you to “traverse” across website structures and relate content in differnt part of the information architecture that don’t sit into this hierarchy. It’s often useful to have multiple kinds of metadata, particularly faceted taxonomy, if your content is particularly complicated and needs a lot of content relationships in order to achieved desired user journeys.
Where the WCM isn’t a standalone application but needs to integrate with other systems in a web platform – user directories, CRM, eCommerce, transactional tools – you need to validate how it will communicate with other systems. Is it through the Application Programming Interface (API), web services, or some other method?
The maintenance and extensibility of the system can also be important requirements. If I need to change a content type, what does that involve? If I need to get data from another application, can I do this in a de-coupled way?
Some other factors may come into play, such as workflow, internationaisation and personalisation. If one product is particularly strong in one of these areas and it’s a key requirement, then it may get into a shortlist even if it’s weaker in some of the other areas identified above.
This all brings me to the recent debate about whether WordPress is a CMS, with numerous contributions on Twitter as well as from:
My experience of WordPress is that it’s really good at two key features where some established content management systems are relatively poor: search engine optimisation and comments. On SEO, it ties your blog post title to a friendly URL, enables good internal linking (as long as you don’t move any pages), allows tagging and categorisation and offers some great SEO tools. Comments meanwhile can be quite tricky for some WCM that operate separate content contribution and consumption environments, but WordPress does this easily, with useful anti-spamming tools and the ability to follow the comment conversation by RSS or email.
When it comes to the question of whether WordPress is or isn’t a WCM, the best analogy I could come up with was a camera phone. A camera phone does take pictures, it is convenient, some phones even have a flash and autofocus. But would you get a camera phone specifically to use as a camera? I think not if you’re serious about photography, It is a camera, but a very limited one.
WordPress is a blogging tool with some shared characteristics of a WCM. If you apply some of the many available modules to it you can come up with a really nice proposition, up to a point. But you’re effectively hacking the software to get it to behave as many WCM already do. You can get any software to do pretty much anything in the end, but that still doesn’t make it a WCM.
WordPress is widely used by many organisations as a web content management system and there are a lot of photos taken on camera phones. But you need to understand the product’s limitations and if these don’t affect you and you’re achieving what you want, then no one should criticise you for your choice. But let’s be sensible about it and say that even if there’s no such thing as the best WCM, you know that it wouldn’t be WordPress.
This is a rant. I rarely write rants, but here is one. It is based on one of my largest pet peeves in the technology industry. It is about a commonly accepted term and not about the people who use it.
It is about “CMS”. This is a term that for many is synonymous with Web Content Management. This just gives me the screaming heebie jeebies. Let me illustrate.
I was at a meeting in DC called the Web Content Mavens recently. The topics of discussion should be obvious. I made a comment to a group there that there is content that isn’t web content. This person, an experienced “CMS” implementer did not believe that any such “content” existed. I used the easy examples of Word and Excel files. She immediately jumped to the conclusion that if it wasn’t web content, it was documents. I then fired some examples at her:
Her eyes lit up as if I had just revealed a whole new world of content to her. I didn’t. I revealed the world of content, not a new one. She hadn’t been living in the world of content. She had been in the world of web content.
There is more to Content Management than managing Web Content!!!
Being able to publish or host a website does not make something a CMS!!!
The Growing Itch
I first noticed the problem several years ago. I went to an event focused on Content Management Systems and noticed that everything focused on publishing a website. Ah, Web Content Management, I know a little on this topic, I thought to myself.
The problem is that people don’t think of it as WCM, or any similar terms. They think of it as CMS. This drives me NUTS! There are systems out there that manage content, quite well, but don’t publish to the web. They don’t get considered a CMS by many people.
I hate the term. It is a term that has such potential, but so many people use it in such a limited fashion. Qualify the thing with “Web CMS” or create a new friggin term.
Let’s look at some of the people using the term (keep in mind I like and respect most, if not all, of the people behind these sites)
There is a big world out there. All you Web CMS people need to give the term CMS back! It doesn’t belong to you. A long time ago you took it while the broader content community was trying to futz with the term ECM. By the time we realized what was happening, you had taken the term.
To whome does the term belong? That is a topic for another day.
A Quick Breath
This isn’t personal. Far from it. I read the websites listed above and find them valuable.
Pretty much everybody who reads this will have entered the industry with the term CMS firmly entrenched, incorrectly, into daily use. That is life. I had to get this off of my chest so that when I occasionally twitch when the topic of “What is a CMS” comes up in conversation, you know why.
I’m also going to not respond to comments. I’ll allow them and read them, but I’m not going to get sucked into an argument over a rant. This is a rant and there is a lot of irrational emotion that fuels it.
The perennial “what is a CMS” debate broke out this week, with a fairly innocuous tweet from Dirk Shaw, “I am sorry but wordpress is hardly a web content management system.” that many of our CMS community waded into and included this post on CMS Myth arguing in favour and just about everyone arguing against… and crikey [...]
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism is out with fresh survey data on how Americans consume their news.
The findings have big implications for any organization for which content management and content strategy play a role in supporting, interacting with and delivering information to customers. Read: this has tentacles that reach far beyond news organizations and news consumers, deep into the evolving behaviors of all consumers in the age of iPhone and Twitter.
First, the key findings: the Internet, according to Pew’s research, is now the third most popular news platform, behind only local and national TV news. It’s ahead of newspapers and radio – no surprise there.
But the more compelling info relates to the Three P’s of the research study’s findings. According to Pew:
‘The internet and mobile technologies are at the center of the story of how people’s relationship to news is changing. In today’s new multi-platform media environment, news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory:
• Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized: 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.’
For news and non-news organizations, the Three P’s pose many questions around content (and content management) that beg answers and point to opportunities:
• Do you have an effective strategy for delivering mobile content to your diverse audiences? With the rise of the iPhone, iPad and other phone and reader devices, what is your plan, and will you get left behind as your readers/customers move their experience to these platforms? Content management platforms are part of the solution here, but require extensive planning and prioritization to prepare to roll out effective content experiences tailored to these platforms.
• Do you have an effective strategy for personalizing the online content experience? This question also goes far beyond the personalized news feeds or news content tailored to your preferences – if you’re a corporation, or a brand, or a college, or a non-profit: are you prepared for this inexorable shift to more personalized content experiences? The good news is CMS platforms are working overtime to deliver on the promise of if not personalized then (at least) lightly customized content experiences.
• Do you have an effective strategy for utilizing social networks for connecting your information to readers/customers? Implicit in Pew’s research is that social networks have fast become not just platforms for dissemination of information, but also effective filters on the river of news and information that flows toward us all. Your trusted friends (even the 1,000 people you follow on Twitter) serve as unofficial editors delivering their ‘best of’ links and news and content they think you should know about. It’s a stark wake up call to traditional publishers and communicators whose branded influence (hello, networks and newspapers) are waning perhaps even faster than they think. The opportunity if you’re a corporation or brand is to determine how best to harness social networks and turn these trusted sources of information into active distribution channels for your content.
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This is the second installment of “The Problem With ‘E’ in ECM” – Follow this link to read the first post.
When you look at the impact SharePoint has made in the content management arena the metrics are truly astounding. So much so that we now talk about SharePoint as a market unto itself. ISV’s and integrators [...]
So, here’s a question…is WordPress a CMS?
And be careful how you respond.
The debate hit Twitter tonight triggered by a relatively harmless Tweet from Dirk Shaw:
I’ve been a part of similar discussions on how WordPress can or can’t scale to support larger sites. It wasn’t until another vendor and a CMS evangelist piled on in unanimous agreement that I felt the need to offer a brief reply in disagreement:
I’m not one to defend any one vendor, but it’s a silly argument.
Of course WordPress is a content management system. It’s technology that manages website content. And it manages quite a few websites I may add. I know plenty of fairly robust sites that get along just fine with WordPress. There’s of course a legitimate debate on what types of sites are best suited for WordPress.
But apparently I hit a third rail in the CMS world, because the comments kept flowing.
A number of other folks weighed in, including several that agreed that WordPress should be considered a CMS.
In the grand scheme, this is a relatively trivial debate. Even the folks siding against WordPress as a CMS were for the most part arguing for a different label or pointing out that it wasn’t “enterprise” enough to be considered a true CMS. Toss in a few open source fans and the debate can get religious in a hurry.
This is where the CMS world goes sideways. It’s insider baseball at the expense of the end user trying to make heads and tails of their web publishing strategy.
It still remains a vendor and consultant dominated landscape of folks trying to frame the space based on the tools and put up artificial walls based on product price points or analyst quadrants/waves. And yes, I lump myself into that bucket, although I try my hardest to stay on the outside.
Don’t even get us started on what to call our space (ECM, WCM, CMS, CM).
So, should WordPress be called a content management system? Absolutely.
Does it matter? Not really.
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