The evolution of Content Management Systems (CMS)

We’ve learned a lot of lessons about content management systems over the past few years—some of them painful.

As much as we make informed decisions with CMS selection, and always use our best judgment to steer clients in the right direction, technology changes at an alarming rate.

In the past, more than a few early adopters of latest-and-greatest vendor-built CMS found themselves saddled with an unfriendly, feature-deprived and, soon, obsolete system.

Out-of-the-box Content Management Systems were complicated, messy software that typically created hurdles for people trying to do simple things on their site. We’ve encountered too many that were absolute nightmares to work with—forcing users to spend more time managing the content management system than managing the content.

Today, for businesses that continually generate unique content, access to easy, timely content management, authoring, organizing, presenting and storage is essential. And making the correct CMS selection is of paramount importance.

Management of a Website’s content flow should be well thought out in advance. Look down the road to a time when your archived copy, images, video and whatever other technology you’re using starts to bloat—and organizing your growing content assets becomes more and more challenging, Scalability needs to be considered when making a selection or trying to understand what needs your website will have in 5, 10, 15, 20 years time.

Some things that you’ll need to consider when evaluating a content management system.

• Search – What are the internal search capabilities of this specific content management system, and how is the data retrieved.
• Versioning – Does your system create back-ups of your content? Does the content get purged at any stage? If so, when?
• Content Check-in & Check-out – If two users are working on content at the same time, will their changes be overwritten or will they have two versions saved and compared when the content editors realize the content has been checked in or out at the same time.
• Content Approval – Is there workflow management where content needs to be approved by an editor?
• Scalability & Extensibility – Who is behind the CMS? Is there an active development team or community pushing the software so that it can handle new developments in web technology? What other companies or organizations are using this product?
• Content scheduling/expiration – Can the content be scheduled to post automatically and be removed automatically by date and time?
• Task management – Can tasks be assigned from within the content management system so that users are required to make edits, check them off and/or carry out content collaboration.
• Multi-lingual – Does the content management system support multi-language support? Perhaps that better question is does it support it well?

The evolution of CMS over the past few years has been rapid and radical. While mid-to-enterprise-level commercial content management systems improved in recent years, they’ve been pushed aside by “the user revolution”.

Publishing content is no longer restricted to Webmasters, news outlets and businesses that could afford an expensive CMS. You no longer need FTP access, domain ownership, web hosting and HTML coding skills to publish content.

Web historians will likely point to the emergence of Web-based CMS, such as Geocities, as the bridge to easy accessibility and user-friendliness. With the advent of blogs, users took control of how they wanted to publish content, manage templates, administer versioning control, model content, add functionality, and many other tasks that had been dictated by the CMS vendor.

In the early days of blogging, we thought “If only blogging software and commercial enterprise-level Content Management Systems could have a child—software that allowed for changes to ALL aspects of the website, not just the content...”

…Enter open sourced content management systems, my topic for my next blog.