tfnico's blog

This is the fifth post about digging deeper into content management requirements. See also Requirement Overview Technical Requirements Management Requirements End-user Requirements Costs 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 think...

This is the fourth post about digging deeper into content management requirements. See also Requirement Overview Technical Requirements Management Requirements End-user Requirements This is perhaps the most important factor for WCMS buyers. The total cost of an information system is easily displaced as buyers have a tendency to ignore the total lifecycle of the software. A CIO in a small company could explain that she spends zero on web content management since she does it all by herself, but the number of hours she spends updating the web content each week might amount to a significant expense relative to the size of the company. A WCMS has costs upon acquisition. The software is bought, and additional modules or plug-ins will likely add to the price. It must be tested, deployed and tweaked by developers to fit the company's environment. A web design must be applied to the templates. Users must be instructed on how to use the system. Older content must be imported. There are ...

This is the third post about digging deeper into content management requirements. See also Requirement Overview Technical Requirements Management Requirements Today I'm gonna run through two categories of requirements. They both have to do with how the CMS is portrayed towards the end-user, through translation and delivery. Globalization International companies need multilingual web-sites [Huang, 2001] with internationalization and localization features . Internationalization This is the concept of having country and language-specific content, essentially having the main content of the web-site translated to one or more languages [Iverson, 2002]. Translation of a WCMS can be divided into two parts. The most important one is how the content itself can be translated by the content managers. The other aspect is the language of the WCMS itself regarding internal interfaces for administration and management. Localization This refers to visual effects based on the visitor'...

For the last few weeks I've had the joy of working with a portal solution that also provides excellent CMS features. More often than not, portal meets CMS by being a Portal with some junky editor functionality inside , but there are also some CMS'es that feature bits'n'pieces of functionality like portlets, widgets and plugins. The portal I've been working seems to strike in the middle. It has the richest CMS interface I've come across in a portal product (content structure, versioning, editing all neatly packed into a comfy filthy fat applet client that actually works), and every bit of content is actually an instance of a portlet by its own right (how they've managed to keep the performance so high is quite impressive, and a mystery to me). This means that not only can I choose each piece of content from a large variety of portlet packages, but I can also transcend content between different states , which is a very handy portlet feature. However, there is...

This is the second post about digging deeper into content management requirements. See also Requirement Overview Technical Requirements I meant to write some more and original stuff that's floating around inside my head these days, but the weekend was spent in a winter resort with work (we tried kiting, snow rafting, ruled the after-ski and had a great time otherwise). I'm a bit worn out at the moment, so here's a quick paste from what I've written on CMS requirements earlier, detailing out the parts I've put in the category management requirements . Management Requirements The person or persons who will be spending the most time on the web-site are no doubt the ones responsible for managing the online content, be it a company clerk, a webmaster or a chief information/content/knowledge officer. If this user does not find the CMS practical and usable, the content will quickly stagnate, and site traffic drop. Creation For the authors, the most important functiona...

I don't know much Finnish, but appearantly I'm being referred to from Finnish Wikipedia . I'm guessing it has something to do with Content Management Saunas (they're linking to this post ).

I recently posted about the fabled CMS requirements , providing my own categorization without any further elaboration on what the different req's imply. Today I'm gonna fill in the holes on the first category, Technical Requirements : Technical requirements are the obligatory basic needs of the environment, hardware and software hosting and maintaining the WCMS. The successful deployment of a WCMS depends on many information infrastructural circumstances and politics like management priority, user acceptance and technical feasibility. As will be declared in a later post, the main requirement of a WCMS is extensibility, and the one who has to make use of this requirement is indeed the developer responsible for deploying and running the WCMS in-house of the intended organization or corporation. The hardware requirements and costs have not been a main issue in my experiences with maintaining CMS. I therefore disregarded the still very crucial requirements of scalability , avai...

I've managed to get involved with the local Oslo Interactive Ruby-community (IRB) ( citycita group here ). I've been to a good handful of Ruby-presentations the last year ( JavaZone , XP-meetup , as well as IRB and JavaBin ), and I still haven't gotten around to really fiddle with Ruby *shame*. Anyhow, yesterday I was at another Ruby meetup, and as these meetups are getting increasingly more popular, I told Marius I'd ask around to see if we could use our office for the next meetup . As you can see, the theme for the next meetup will be hacking on IRB's "CMS". It is currently running on a Wordpress-like engine called Mephisto , which is written in Ruby of course. I've always been a big proponent of using blog-engines as your CMS since you probably don't need much else than what today's blog can deliver, so this will be an interesting opportunity to prove that point. It will also be interesting to see whether I'll have any idea about wha...

When I wrote the thesis about implications of using open source and open standards in Content Management Systems, I needed a set of requirements that would fit the structure of the rest of the thesis. Now I probably started off with a typical list of Bob Boiko's, but over the months of writing it sort of morphed and evolved into its present state. I divided CMS requirements into 6 categories: Technical (the requirements from this point of view, typically formed by the people who have to install and maintain the CMS) Management (the users, the content managers' needs) Globalization Content Delivery (the needs of the audience, the content readers) Costs Extensibility Not sure this table will come out right in the blog, but I attempt to paste it in: Requirement Keywords Technical Deployment Installation, migrat...

The previous post finally mentioned open source CMS'es. To supply readers with some update on the discussions of open source and open standards, here are a couple o' paragraphs from my thesis on these subjects. Note that Sun has since the time of writing decided to open source Java . Open Source Having given some indicators to open source WCM systems, the concept should be properly explained. Open sou rce software refers to programs whose source code is made available for use or modification. This means that open source software is in fact free to acquire [Walli, 2005] and change. A lot of people find this hard to believe, and many presume that such software is produced on a volunteer basis, and therefore lacks quality, security and consistency [Economist, 2006]. This is true for a lot of smaller open source projects, but many projects show signs of the opposite [Raymond, 2000], the most famous of these being the operating system GNU/Linux. There is a prominent cas...

A lot of people of around me tend to ask me where they can find a good CMS solution. The most typical question is how they can get started with their own website (where my typical answer is 'Don't. Register a blog instead'). More ambitous entrepeneurs ask where can they buy a total CMS solution solving business requirement X, Y and Z. To these I often end up answering that such a solution does not exist yet, and it will be darn expensive to develop. However, if they still want to see what's out there, I recommend reading the rest of this blog-post and continue the research on their own. Communities The WCMS market is so large that it is nearly impossible to get a complete overview of solutions. Attempts to explore this market have already been made by some online communities, and in my opinion the best way to experience the market is by following the lead of these communities. There are also a number of annual conferences specifically intended for cont...

Stand-Alone Web Content Management System Many organizations have intranets on which they perform their content management duties. It is natural to propose that the WCMS integrates with the CMS. Parts of the content which should be exposed on the Web already exists somewhere in the CMS, perhaps on the intranet or on a central file server. It is natural to believe that the best solution is to invest in a total solution where a CMS includes the WCMS by displaying the content with a Web interface. The case for choosing an isolated or singular standalone WCMS is explained below. When selecting a system to control their web-site, decision makers are tempted to invest in enterprise solutions. These solutions promise to solve many of the corporate IT-problems with a single centralized silver bullet system. However, the projects where these solutions are selected, implemented and deployed often fail miserably, taking too long to complete. If they ever achieve nominal use,...

Seeing as this blog still picks up some traffic, I'm putting a bit of effort in to get some of my pre-historic thoughts into the open. They sounded like a good idea enough to write down (in the thesis), so they're probably interesting to post here. The last thing I posted about was about the evolution of web content management . Funny, when I wrote that the original title was actually The Levels of WCM, but when I looked over it later it was like I'd written a journey through the 90'ies online publishing; from httpd to lamp. Now here's the next section I wrote. It's about the alternative forms of WCM, some of which have grown/shrunk into/away from eachother the last few years: Alternatives to Web Content Management Systems To further explain web content management, one can consider what other web content tools and management systems are used today , and what separates these from full WCM systems [Byrne, 2001], [Junco, 2004]. The definitions in use...

Edit: Seems Writely doesn't publish images onto here. Argh. It is challenging to make a clear distinction that separates WCM systems from similar information systems. To explore this one must understand the possible ways to do web content management. Various architectures of implementation exist. One possible categorization is presented here. These four levels are a way to divide the physical management of content. In general one can say that the higher use of web content in a company, the higher level its WCMS implementation should be. The separation is historical and drawn from my personal experience with web development through the last decade, therefore the evolutionary approach. Static files on a web-server The most basic strategy is to compose static HTML files and transfer these to a web server capable of serving such files to clients connecting to the web-site. It is possible to apply styles to the pages, for example with the help of cascading style-sheets (CSS). Conten...