Everyone hates their CMS

I've been thinking about an issue for a new breed of online publisher, one that starts as a blog, then grows into a real, commercial, multimedia-enabled web site -- with all the other accoutrements -- e.g., hyper-distribution of its content through widgets, etc. -- that one often sees today.  The issue is the difficulty of finding a third-party content management system (CMS) that is adequately flexible and scales with the success of the business -- in all dimensions: traffic, media file types available on the site, content distribution, etc.  While this may betray some subtle bias in the sample, most online publishers I know, even smallish ones, end up "rolling their own" CMS because they can't get third-party offerings to work in the way they need.

A company that illustrates this dilemma is Halogen Guides (www.halogenguides.com) -- (full disclosure: I'm involved in Halogen Guides), about which more over the next several posts.

There are, of course, several "off the shelf" low-end CMS's:  Moveable Type and Wordpress are two of the better known.  At the high-end, one finds Interwoven and Vignette as big enterprise-level solutions.  But in the case of Halogen Guides, as well as most of the major, large online publishers vis-a-vis Interwoven or Vignette (or other similar offerings), the platforms offered by third-party vendors were not adequate to the task as the business grew, and grew more complex, and the online publishers, big and small, ended up developing their own CMS.

Over the next couple of posts, I'm hoping to explore this phenomenon in a little more detail, and would love to hear from readers about their experiences in this regard.

Comments

[Alan Steele]

I'm not an expert in this area (unless you count having lost some money on IWOV some years ago), but I have heard enough good things about Drupal, and have seen enough community and developer involvement around it, to think that that there's something there. I would encourage you to dig deeper on Drupal if you are investigating this space.

[Dave Toole]

My team has been working with Drupal with one of our properties called Ourmedia. The open source community is strong and getting stronger as well as connecting in with other open source capabilities like WordPress. We are migrating to Drupal 6.0 with a great deal of support with modular development and testing from the developer community so we can we support our community of over 150,000 digital content producer members.

[kt]

totally agree with you!

[Harry Singh]

I'm yet to find the best CMS :(

[Tom]

I've tried many different blog/CMS apps, wordpress, movable types, text pattern, etc... all of them loosing market to Drupal. Drupal has a strong following plus a very dynamic/active developer community. Big sites are using Drupal successfully now... some people say Drupal is not scalable, but that's only because they don't know how to scale drupal or any other app. At the end of the day Drupal is far superior than any of the above choices... Now, vignette, that's a whole different monster... I remember a buddy of mine was trying to roll it out at his company, took a year before they decided to throw it away... way too complex.