Skip to main content

Digging deeper into CMS requirements (#5: The last one)

This is the fifth post about digging deeper into content management requirements. See also

I know I was going to rant about agile development and Scrum soon, but what the heck; I'm inspired! Today I'm gonna finish off the CMS Requirements thread and describe THE most important requirement of all. And hopefully on sunday I will explain how all these requirements are interconnected by two key principles:
  • Open Source
  • Open Standards
Now writing about the other requirements has been quite a booring affair. They have just been sort of basic explanations that can lead up to sunday's post.

However, this requirement is no ordinairy rabbit! It's not measurable, you can't actually describe it, and it's darn hard to implement! It is a utopical state software, an *ility of the highest degree.

2 years of CMS research, coffee drinking, chocolate-chip cookie eating and hard thinking made me believe that the most important requirement of a content management system is...

Extensibility

There ye have it. The number one thing that comes back to kick me in the head after having delivered a top-notch user friendly CMS is this:

Customer: "Oh, the new homepage looks great. Can we put our boat/customer/shop/weather/blog/forum/registry/directory/services up there?"

Extensibility. The quality of software that allows you to extend basic functionality with new custom tailored stuff. The last 20 or 10% that you need to get the perfect CMS.

There are many factors that multiply into this one. Stuff like plugins, portlets, parts and widgets are implementations where people have tried to put extensions. Modularity is factor, as is simplicity in the code base.

But the most common factor in extensibility is openness and agreements. Standards.

If I can understand my CMS, I know how to extend it.

This is actually a quality in most software! In fact lower level software like programming languages and operating systems are based on the very possibility of extension.

But we are talking about CMS'es here. And they deal with content. Content is historically not a very extensible format. You define your SQL schema or file-format, and you stick to it. Once you start using it you can forget anything about extending the use of your content, translating it, exporting it in a usable format, or importing other kinds of content. At least not for anything less than a fortune in developer costs. There are no content standards (well, some are appearing, like RDF and JCR).

If we do settle on a content standard that offers us the possibility to extend the use of our content we can start developing CMS'es that can realise the potential of extensible content.

Yes, you can extend your CMS for user registration and profile editing. You can expose your content as blog-posts. You can create articles of content that are either news, weather-forecasts, image-libraries, data-sheets, documents, and so on and so forth. You just need the content format to do so.

Let us stop hammering content into relational databases! Stop pushing maps and references into flat tables. Stop creating portlets, widgets, plugins and templates just to display your table-relational data a certain way.

Instead store your content in a generic way, and expose it a generic way. These are the principles the Internet is built around; standard storage format and standard transport format. We seem to have come a long way on the transport format, but are still way behind on the storage format because of greedy, properitary vendors that have not sooner come together to standardize content storage.

Well, I think that rant was a bit of a head start on sunday's post, but I'll hold on to the rest of it for now. In the future I'm gonna slide in on a track which focuses more on the field of open source and open standards, and let me add that I haven't been reading up on my Open Source Journal recently, so if I am obviously repeating any ideas that others have published, let me know.

Need to write invitations for the upcoming St. Patrick's day party :)
Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous16/3/07 09:15

    Hey Thomas,

    Your Blog rocks!! Just wanted to share something with ya… one blogger to another…
    There is this amazing site that I came across where u can make money by sharing information…check it out here’s the link http://www.myndnet.com/login.jsp?referral=alpa83&channel=RM

    The coolest part is…every time ur information gets sold u get paid for it!!
    I signed it for it.. very cool stuff… u can also mail me at barot.alpa@gmail.com

    Cheers!
    Alpa

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous17/4/07 14:25

    Thomas,

    I can see you have a great interest in CMS products. Is it your own one as a hobby, or it's a part of your engagement to Objectware? I know neither Dutch, nor Swedish, so I wonder if Objectware has its own CMS or would like to expand to have one. If the latter is true, I have some option to discuss. Just drop me a line to polonski.REMOVE@xitexsoftware.com

    Thank you.

    Alex Polonski

    ReplyDelete
  3. Iatek19/3/09 00:46

    Hi Thomas,

    Realzing this post is a few years old, it was spot on! You had a very interesting take on CMS seletion.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant...
6 comments
Read more

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be...
1 comment
Read more

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org  - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Git-SVN Mirror without the annoying update-ref

This post is part of  a series on Git and Subversion . To see all the related posts, screencasts and other resources, please  click here .  So no sooner than I had done my git-svn presentation at JavaZone , I got word of a slightly different Git-SVN mirror setup that makes it a bit easier to work with: In short, my old recipe includes an annoying git update-ref step to keep the git-svn remote reference up to date with the central bare git repo. This new recipe avoids this, so we can simply use git svn dcommit   directly. So, longer version, with the details. My original recipe is laid out in five steps: Clone a fresh Git repo from Subversion. This will be our  fetching repo. Set up a  bare repo. Configure pushing from the fetching repo to bare repo In the shoes of a developer, clone the repo Set up an SVN remote in the developer's repo In the new approach, we redefine those last two steps: (See the original post for how to do the fir...
17 comments
Read more

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --...
12 comments
Read more