There are hundreds of content management systems on the market
today, and the continued dramatic growth in CMSs and technologies
has defied the usual rules of business software markets. The number
of new product launches by old and new companies is still
outstripping ongoing consolidation.
When even a full-time content management expert has a hard time
keeping up with all the new products and features, especially since
managing content involves technologies that go well beyond a CMS,
how does a non-technical person choose a CMS?
That's where we can help. StoneHenge Partners has years of
experience in analyzing, selecting, designing, integrating, and
developing CMSs from enterprise-class to open-source. Our advice:
The key to success is designing the system to fit your needs.
Background: What is a CMS?
A content management system is a software program that makes
building and maintaining Web sites faster and easier.
Here's an example: You want to add a new product and have that
product show up on the home page, category page, "related products"
page, and of course its own page. Without a CMS, you have to
perform the same activity four separate times on four separate
pages. With a CMS, you only have to post the product once, and any
staff member can do it, regardless of their technical
expertise.
How does this work? Content management systems store your actual
content (text and images) in a database. The system can then
automatically pull the content out and show it on the appropriate
pages based on rules that you set up in advance. The ways you can
organize it, and the types of rules you can use, depend on how
structurally flexible the CMS is and how well designed the content
model is. This setup makes it easy for content administrators to
create content without worrying about technical issues. Only basic
knowledge of HTML markup is required.
Content management systems also separate esthetic design from
the content itself. This is accomplished through templates -
graphic design layers that control graphic elements, font and
navigation styles, and page layouts for each page on the site. You
simply choose a pre-designed template for your page.
Here is a screenshot of the
Umbraco content tree for this website.
The content model
The key to success in setting up a CMS is the content model.
This is a set of business requirements, styling rules and content
organization, which programmers use to configure and build the
components that will render your site your way. The content model
includes:
- Information architecture. How your content is
most naturally organized. It includes a nav tree (site map) showing
sections, categories and details (aka trunk, branch and leaf.)
- Input forms. Called a "doc type" in Umbraco,
this is the form that a user fills out to input content into the
CMS database. It typically includes such content fields as Title,
Body, Caption, and Image, plus hidden fields such as Meta Keywords
and Meta Description. Specialized kinds of page may also have
fields such as Price, SKU#, or Related Items.
- Templates. Called "themes" in SharePoint and
"skins" in open-source CMSs, this is the code that renders the page
to the browser. A well-designed CMS gives you multiple templates to
choose from - a home page, an inside page, a video page, a calendar
page, etc.
- Media. Most CMSs organize images, videos and
files (liks PDFs) in a separate area from pages and text, so
they can be reused by multiple pages.
- Workflow. This is the process through which a
content item (page, image, etc.) travels from first draft through
approval to publication to the web.
CMS content modeling is a strength of StoneHenge Partners. We
have analysts, architects and developers with extensive experience
in a wide variety of systems.
- We have hands-on experience with enterprise-class systems,
including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), SiteCore,
SiteFinity, and Percussion.
- We built 8 websites in 2009 using the best open-source .NET
CMS, Umbraco, including this
website.
- We have expertise in the three leading open-source PHP systems:
WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.
What we think
Want to get to know our options about content management? Here
are some of our blog posts: