New AJAX-happy CMS: MooFlex, more info at Ajaxian (and in their podcast).

cms, opensource cms, web application, mooflex, ajaxian, content management system

Zach got a call from the Serena Collage rep who rattled off this list of customers in New England:

• Boston College
• Northeastern
• Bristol Community College
• UMass Lowell

cms, content management, web content management, serena, collage, serena collage, content management system, vendor, commercial cms

We got the demo yesterday of Sungard/SCT’s Luminis Content Management Suite (sales video). I mentioned previously that the sales rep thinks Pima Community College and Edison College show it off well.

Here’s what we learned in the demo:

It started with the explanation that data is stored as XML, processed by JSP, and rendered to the browser as XHTML according to templates, layouts, and “web views.” It was later explained that the product was “web server agnostic” and could run under Apache, IIS, SunOne, or others. This works because the only relationship between the web server and LCMS is on the file system. LCMS works up the pages, then spits them out onto the filesystem to be picked up by the webserver. LCMS does not dynamically generate the pages, and it has no features to support dynamic content.

LCMS supports three modes for admins and content authors to view and edit content: in-context, “site studio,” and some other mode that wasn’t demonstrated. WYSIWYG editing was via the Real Objects editor. They were proud of the editor’s ability to accept content, including a table, pasted in from MS Word, but a look at the code revealed some of the same ugliness that we’ve seen from an export directly from Word.

The software is workflow heavy and our demonstrator had to “manually promote” content with every example. He assured us this would not be necessary under production circumstances, but the product had the appearance of having been designed to slow or prevent changes to web content rather than streamline the process.

From now on I’ll be asking the following question at all demos:

The library is hosting an exhibition next week. Please walk us through the process of creating a new page to describe and promote the event and then integrate that page in the library’s site taxonomy.

I mention this because the demo didn’t show us anything like that. We saw only the editing of pages and it looked frustratingly cumbersome, with one example requiring several return visits to the site studio to promote an edited page from in-progress to approved to live (three is the minimum number of steps, but we were told we can have 15 or 20 or more if we wanted). If the content author didn’t have promotion authority, then the process could require the involvement and coordination of two or more people. It’s easy to imagine days passing before page corrections went live and weeks passing before new content could be put online.

That said, the site admins have it a little easier (if only because one assumes they have supreme permissions for everything). The templating didn’t look bad, but because the product doesn’t generate any dynamic pages, it couldn’t take advantage of some automation opportunities (the demonstrator was excited to tell us the footer text — “copyright 2005” — could be globally changed by editing a singe file, but we were curious why the copyright date wasn’t dynamically generated).

Permissions can be assigned per object by user or group. These details are stored in the Luminis LDAP, but they’re not shared with or based on any group or permission we’re already managing. That is, we’ll have to pay attention to provisioning (and de-provisioning) specific to the CMS. It’s amusing that vendors claim LDAP integration but remain ignorant of identity management issues.

There are seven levels of permission for each user or group on each object:

• none
• browse
• read
• relate
• version
• write
• delete

And then there are these extended permissions:

• exec
• change location
• change state
• change perms
• change owner

It’s worth noting that the product maintains versioned copies of each content object, making it very easy to revert to any previous saved edit or simply review prior content.

Somewhere along the line we were told “at its core you get a document management system.” And then we saw a demo of the product working as a document repository. The demos showed a content author “checking out” a Word file via the browser, downloading it for editing, then checking the edited version back in, entering metadata and version info, and viewing the changed document in the repository.

APIs?

• Web Development Kit
  — Java apps that create the content authoring/management interface
• Documentum Foundation Classes
  — C++ API that runs the show

There are no SOAP or other webservices-based APIs, and it didn’t seem like there was much movement toward them.

Implementation?
A claimed three to six month implementation process including four or more weeks of service from SCT.

cms, lcms, sct, sungard, luminis, luminis cms, content management system, sungard sct, luminis content management suite, content management, web content management, demo, sales demo

With 1,800 CMS vendors in the marketplace, we’re mining what we know or know-of as a way to shorten the list. Kim named the following four:

• Joomla, a derivative of Mambo
   
• Collage appears to have good content reuse features
   
• OmniUpdate has a good list of higher ed clients
   
• Drupal: open source and turning heads

cms, content management system, joomla, collage, omniupdate, drupal, commercial, open source, oss, web, web management

We’re looking at the Sungard/SCT Luminis Content Management Suite (sales video). The real demo comes later, but the sales rep thinks Pima Community College and Edison College show it off well. Hmm.

cms, lcms, sct, sungard, luminis, luminis cms, content management system

CMS Market Watch tells us that there are 1,800 CMS vendors, and some of them are getting a little feisty.

cms, content management system, content management systems, vendor, vendors, 1800, cms vendors, feisty, marketplace, competition

Everybody wants a content management system, but there’s little agreement about what a CMS is or what it should do. Even knowledgeable people often find themselves struggling for an answer before giving up and defining a CMS by example.

The problem is that we know we want better websites, and we know technology should help, but how.

Jeffery Veen offers some sage advice to those who would ignore the non-technical facets of the problem:

Over and over I’ve heard the same complaint about [CMS implementations], “Turns out, after all the budget and time we spent, we really didn’t need a content management system at all. We just needed some editors.”

That is, software can’t build good websites. The web lives on text, well written text, and that has to be at the center of any CMS project. Veen’s suggestion that companies put more editorial staff on the job may seem at odds with my own recommendations that companies encourage blogging and distributed authorship, but I see them as complementary. Every site needs strong leadership, editors, not web designers, should be driving that.

Still, organizations go looking for software solutions to the problem. Big name commercial solutions in this space include Vignette, Broadvision, nCompass, Interwoven, and Open Market Content Server, but all of these six-digit price-tag CMSs appear to suffer a gap between buyer’s expectations and actual product functionality, according to Shorewalker.

Among other salient quotes from Jupiter Resarch reports on CMSs, the Shorewalker story offers this:

Today, more than 60 percent of companies that have deployed Web content management solutions still find themselves manually updating their sites…

That’s a huge risk for a product with such a high price tag, but where Shorewalker’s story rings my bell is here:

[T]he real cost isn’t in the box of software. It’s in the cheques you write to the people who install, adapt and maintain the software.

Remember, the cost of any software product is be broken into three categories: acquisition, integration, and maintenance. Some product categories have relatively low integration costs, but CMS are too immature and our needs are too diverse to be among them. And this is why home-grown and open-source CMS solutions are worth a good look: you may have to invest more on integration, but the result will probably be better than with a commercial product, and the total investment will most likely be lower because it eliminates the acquisition costs.

tags: broadvision, cms, cms pitfalls, cms project, cmss, commerical vs. open source, content management, content management system, editorial authority, interwoven, pitfalls, vignette, web content, web designers, web site management

WordPress’s Pages open the door to using WP as a content management system. Unfortunately, Pages can’t be edited via XML-RPC blogging apps like Ecto. This might be a good thing, but I’m foolhardy enough to try working around it.

Here’s how:

Find a text editor you like and open up the wp-includes/functions-post.php file.

in the wp_get_recent_posts() function, change this:

$sql = “SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status IN ('publish', 'draft', 'private') ORDER BY post_date DESC $limit”;

to this:

$sql = “SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status IN ('publish', 'draft', 'private', 'static') ORDER BY post_date DESC $limit”;

Now, in the wp_update_post() function, look for this block of code:

// Escape data pulled from DB.
$post = add_magic_quotes($post);
extract($post);

and insert this block underneath it:

// XML-RPCs apps can't return “static” post status,
// so we have to work around it
$page_status = NULL;
if($post_status == “static”)
$page_status = “static”;

And follow that up by looking for this block:

// Now overwrite any changed values being passed in. These are
// already escaped.
extract($postarr);

and insert this block underneath it:

// set post_status static if this is a page
if($page_status)
$post_status = $page_status;

Fair warning: this works in my limited testing, but don’t blame me if you try it and it breaks something. You’d be a fool to mess with this on a live install, so don’t.

tags: blog, blogg as cms, blogg as content management system, blogging, cms, content management system, ecto, hack, hacking, hacking wordpress, php code, wordpress, wordpress hack, wordpress hacks, wordpress pages, xml rpc, xmlrpc

A friend and I have been talking about what it would take to turn WordPress into a CMS. We both have our doubts, but today I found this job ad that suggests we’re not alone in at least thinking of the possibility.

Needed: Web Designer/Programmer For Our Sites

We’re growing very fast, and have outgrown our current CMS and design. We’re looking for a designer and/or programmer to redesign our rapidly growing network and implement a CMS that ties it all together. The network includes our planned ContentNext hub, paidContent.org, MocoNews.net, and ContentSutra, along with BillboardPostplay, our joint venture with Billboard. In addition to redesigning the front end, we’re migrating all of the sites to a common platform with an integrated database. Our preference is WordPress with enhancements to make it more of CMS; we’ve also explored Drupal as a CMS and we’re open to another open-source CMS if it can achieve our objective. We’re planning a mid-fall relaunch.

In addition to WordPress, the right person/team will be well versed in PHP, web standards, MYSQL and experienced in deployment of multi-site content networks as well as taxonomy.

We are not averse to a team consisting of a lead developer with high-level experience and a person or persons with less experience as long as it doesn’t affect our timeline or the quality of the project.

Contact me, Rafat Ali, with your portfolio/skills and we can discuss further.

Anyway, I forwarded this to Zach with the subject: “affirmation.”

tags: affirmation, cms, content management system, content networks, job ad, wordpress, wp