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.

Posted on February 9, 2005 in Content Management, Quicklinks

Comments

  1. February 9, 2005 by Woolly

    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.

  2. February 9, 2005 by Roger Johansson (Author comment)

    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.

  3. February 10, 2005 by Nameless Face

    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. :(

  4. February 10, 2005 by paul haine

    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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