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 – [...]
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 [...]
Packt is pleased to announce Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide, a new book that helps PHP developers build applications that interface with the customer, product, and order data using Magento’s Core API. Written by Jamie Huskisson, this book is packed with examples for effective Magento development.
Magento is an Open Source, e-commerce web application that was created by Varien, and built on components of the Zend Framework. Magento is the hottest and most powerful e-commerce software and has gained popularity in a short period of time. Users can control the look, content and functionality of their e-commerce web site with the help of Magento’s powerful theming engine.
Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide will help developers extend and customize the Magento e-commerce system using PHP code. They will get familiar with the architecture and internal structure of Magento and learn about the best modules available. Developers can then build a shipping module for their Magento store to give users options for receiving their items once they have paid for them.
When visiting a local company last month, I was given a glimpse of their requirements for their new Knowledge Services Framework vision and requirements. It was inspiring and incredible. They had mapped all the functions that they perform, identified existing systems that matched, and then had measured each of them to the following vision.
Here is their requirements as presented. The highlights are theirs.
leverage consumer applications proven to augment existing work processes (parity plus)
specifically targeted to business requirements and opportunities
access with only a browser and an internet connection
no reliance on proprietary systems or technology
development based on open industry standards
built upon a semantic web framework
embraces and enables BYOC model
no operating system dependency
provides web service capabilities
tuned options for mobile devices
no browser dependency
no net cost increase
no desktop footprint
100% cloud ready
Vision into Reality
Okay, very pretty and exciting, but we all know from experience that idealistic visions are usually really good on slides, but falter in reality. Can this be made to work in a large (multi-billion dollar), established company with a full suite of legacy products?
After what I saw, I would say Yes.
They had looked at their existing systems and if they didn’t meet the requirements, the vendors were told the issues and given a chance, over 1-2 years, to update their product. When they didn’t, they were replaced. This isn’t the act of rash adopters. This is planned and thought-out.
For new functionality, like blogs and enhanced collaboration spaces, they identified new products, many of them open source, that met their requirements. With open standards, like CMIS, they were plugged-in to the architecture.
They are building a private cloud that allows them to install applications into either Amazon’s platform or locally based upon their needs. They are currently using Amazon’s cloud primarily for development now, but will start mixing it up shortly.
Someone brought in a Mac and said that he now did all his work on it. He had one Windows image to work with a legacy piece of software that needed IE, finance related I believe, but he demonstrated the freedom from the tightly configured company-owned laptop. With a browser and Internet connection, he was good.
They are looking into Semantic capabilities. They want to uniquely adapt the social web with the semantic web in context of [their] business processes. They have a firm grasp of what they are trying to accomplish and are talking to multiple people about how do execute. They aren’t leaning on one "expert", but seeking a complete picture.
I’ve read a lot of people talking about transforming the Enterprise with new technologies. I’ve seen them talk about enabling people to work. This is a complete transformation. Will users leverage the new stuff? Well, they’ll have to use a lot of it because it will be where critical information is stored. The champions have also been selling the idea across the company as the technology evolved to meet their requirements.
It is some cool stuff, potentially the coolest I have seen in technology world to date. I wish them all the luck in the world and hope that I get an opportunity to help out.
This is one project I would not delegate to my team. I’m not worried that they couldn’t deliver, I just want to play with the cool toys in the beautiful architecture.
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.
by Sheri McLeish
The new European browser menu launched this week, and Microsoft in many ways faces a no-win situation. These past few years have been a doozy for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. After extricating itself from a legal mess with Netscape, its IE6 browser braved on and captured more than two-thirds of the market at its height in the fall of 2003. While unbundled, IE’s fortunes remained closely tied the operating system, and so Vista’s failure to displace XP as the standard image for many enterprises around the world also impacted IE7 and IE8’s uptake. Even with the well-received launch of Windows 7, IE’s overall erosion accelerated this past year.
When AOL stopped development of the Netscape browser, it left Mozilla’s Firefox to challenge IE’s dominance. And it’s put up a good fight. Firefox today can claim browser market leadership for tech enthusiasts, with 46.5% of the market compared to 35% for all IE versions combined, according to the latest WC3Schools data. Google also started muscling in with Chrome. After a year-and-a-half on the market, Google finally took Chrome to the people, delivering a marketing onslaught in Europe to coincide with the new browser menu. It seems to be paying off: In January, Google’s Chrome cracked double digits and crept further up in February to 11.6% of the market share. Other market data sources like Netmarketshare aren’t quite as bad for IE, placing all versions of IE combined at 62% of the market versus 24% for Firefox and 5.6% for Chrome. Opera, which initiated the European litigation, only captures 2% of the market but said it’s already feeling the benefit of the browser menu.
But who really cares about browser market share other than the vendors and web developers? I mean, really, they seem to be free and plentiful. Consumers and information workers want web sites to work correctly, for their activities to be secure, and to have features that improve their web browsing experience like speed, add-ons, and customization. But despite improvements on all of these fronts with IE8, particularly around security, Microsoft’s IE6 remains entrenched in many global enterprises, because choice is often dependent on customizations with third-party apps, operating system upgrades, or security/compliance concerns. In these cases, European browser menu choice matters little.
Microsoft has been trying to clean up its web browser mess for enterprises by reaffirming its commitment to interoperability and standards for web browsers and ensuring compatibility between IE7 and IE8. It’s been advocating for more than a year for customers to upgrade to IE8, even if it’s obligated to continue support of IE6 until 2014. But it now seems the acrimony over IE6 is reaching near-hysterical levels, from an online petition in the UK for the British government to ditch IE6 to the revelation that the recent Google hacker attack in China exploited a vulnerability in IE6. (Yes, you read it right: Google was using IE6.)
All of this puts Microsoft in a no-win situation where IE6 remediation is needed. Every client I have spoken with in the past months facing this issue is either staying on IE6 or just letting users download an alternative browser, most often Firefox. Virtualization tends to be assessed and dismissed. Most customers say they will eventually upgrade IE, just as they will move to Windows 7. The effort and aggravation of IE6 application remediation may make more enterprises want to make a clean break from IE. But we don’t think they will. And Microsoft doesn’t want them to be swept away that easily either. Early indications show Microsoft is bucking up with IE9, adding HTML5 support and providing even more standards support. Now, if 6 turned up to be 9, Microsoft would definitely not mind. But for now, it remains a fine mess.
ALEXANDRIA , VA. – Bitrix, Inc. ( www.bitrixsoft.com ), a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, announces the release of Bitrix® Site Manager ASP.NET 4.6 a multi-featured website management solution for the .NET platform now reinforced with an advanced security framework, social networking features and a number of additional enhancements to provide customers cost-effective online tools that compel Internet users to action.
Security Uppermost
“Security is the cornerstone of each and every web project. There is no need for great features if the website can be easily hacked, exposing valuable digital assets and damaging an established image,” said Dmitry Valyanov, President of Bitrix, Inc. “The new version of Bitrix Site Manager ASP.NET combines powerful functionality and integrated proactive protection, shielding websites against malicious programs and hacker attacks.”
The new security framework provides proactive protection against the majority of known web attacks and security flaws like XSS and SQL injections and phishing. The framework recognizes threats among incoming requests, blocks website intrusions and maintains a comprehensive log about suspicious and dangerous activity being registered, providing an opportunity to respond accordingly.
ALEXANDRIA , VA. – Bitrix, Inc. ( www.bitrixsoft.com ), a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, announces the release of Bitrix® Site Manager ASP.NET 4.6 a multi-featured website management solution for the .NET platform now reinforced with an advanced security framework, social networking features and a number of additional enhancements to provide customers cost-effective online tools that compel Internet users to action.
Security Uppermost
“Security is the cornerstone of each and every web project. There is no need for great features if the website can be easily hacked, exposing valuable digital assets and damaging an established image,” said Dmitry Valyanov, President of Bitrix, Inc. “The new version of Bitrix Site Manager ASP.NET combines powerful functionality and integrated proactive protection, shielding websites against malicious programs and hacker attacks.”
The new security framework provides proactive protection against the majority of known web attacks and security flaws like XSS and SQL injections and phishing. The framework recognizes threats among incoming requests, blocks website intrusions and maintains a comprehensive log about suspicious and dangerous activity being registered, providing an opportunity to respond accordingly.
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 [...]