The Great CMS Lie
Have you ever worked with a CMS and somewhere in the middle of it all thought to yourself, “I want to shoot something.” Wait, let me back up. Have you ever worked with a CMS?
See, the concept of these Content Management Systems is deceptively simple. The customer is completely braindead but needs to be able to edit the insanely-difficult-to-understand HTML. Are we on the same page yet? Can I punch in the </sarcasm>?
My current employer is in the middle of releasing the second generation of its in-house CMS “solution”. I don’t intend to pick on them since the problem really has nothing to do with the solution itself. It’s the concept of the CMS. The extremely vast majority of CMS solutions are:
- Not dumb enough for the unskilled.
- Too slow for the skilled.
That’s it.
It all comes back to one very simple fact that I’ll be sure to emphasize excessively later, but first understand there will be two basic users of the system.
The Skilled
These are the web producers/architects/programmers/whatever that built your site. They know their way around the usual web technologies but because you don’t have the slightest clue what’s going on they’ve wrapped the site up in a CMS so that you simple folk can make edits to the fancy-pants HTML. Building the site using this CMS probably took twice as long as using HTML or their favorite server side language. Why? Chances are they have to make templates and set up reusable code blocks and all the other abstractions the CMS forces on a developer. The developer hates the CMS. It is slow.
The Unskilled
So some big-city programmer just made you a website. You want to edit something. Now you have to…log in to a website and click this button then that button then click edit then…wait what? Now instead of learning this crazy HTML you have to learn this complicated application. The complexity you were trying to avoid with code has just been replaced with a different-kind-of-complex web app. This is our first, last, and only needed indicator of the truth:
HTML is not hard. Sort of. More accurately: maintaining HTML is not hard. The only thing making HTML maintenance hard in anyone’s mind is the belief that it’s hard. When you look at it, it’s nothing more than the text you see on screen wrapped in some gibberish you may not understand. But there’s really only a few of these bits of gibberish and they’re probably only used a few times. The effort it takes to learn what this gibberish means is probably less than the effort required to get familiar with your CMS.
Once all the insanity of layout and styling is figured out, making text changes to a site is cake, even for the unskilled. The CMS as a product is 99% of the time a complete waste and something only used by companies to justify vast engineering efforts or boost their top line. By selling uselessness to those too stupid to realize they don’t need it.
With that said there are a couple products in this category I do lightly endorse:
- CushyCMS: No huge templating system, no jamming a site into some expected structure of a CMS. Feed cushy some FTP info and if you want the text to be editable just add a class to that element. Simple, the way it should be.
- Wordpress: What can I say, maybe I’m a little biased (this site is built on Wordpress) but they get things mostly right. It stays simple, helps me in removing effort duplication, and has a great community to back it up. And just wait until the 2.7 interface hits the streets.
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