CMS Do’s and Don’ts
In CMS Do’s and Don’ts, Kirk Biglione lists some things to think about before choosing a CMS for yourself or a client.
He makes some excellent points, and many of the questions raised by this list are worth running by clients early on in the relationship.
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Roger Johansson is a Swedish web professional specialising in web standards, accessibility, and usability. More about me and this site.
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Comments
I'm so tired of checking up on a site after a few months and finding that the customer has all but destroyed it with the fancy WYSIWYG editor they get with the CMS. =/
These are gorvernment sites that are supposed to be very accessible and very strict, but idiots paste word documents into them. ~=(
I think the most important thing is to convince the customer that they don't NEED a WYSIWYG editor, but it's very hard to sell plain text when the compeditors offer everything but the kitchen sink.
I feel your pain. It happens every time. That's why I've started implementing filters that strip most of the junk from the markup when documents are saved from a WYSIWYG editor. It's not perfect or foolproof, but it's something.
I know of a certain employer, who shall remain nameless, who has purchased their CMS without even considering what their requirements are, what the alternatives are.
Then a faux study into requirements was made, with the sole purpose of justifying the £20,000+ lisence fee paid.
It's exasperating, it really is.
Now we've ended up with a CMS from a cetain large company and we'll have to deal with it's complete inability to produce anything that even resembles HTML 4.01 nevermind XHTML. :(
Macromedia Contribute is pretty good for non-technical authors; it does very well in converting Word and Excel files into HTML - all the user has to do is drag and drop the file.
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