Re: Website CMS questions

I'll bite.

Austin, Darrel wrote:
> My biggest gripe with most commercial CMS products we looked at was a
> seemingly huge imbalance between their sales staff and their development
> staff. 

Our ratio is 1 sales guy and 10 developers.

> Am I prejudiced? Probably. That happens when consumers get burned. ;o)

Prejudiced? Probably, but maybe you have the views you have because the 
options you've looked at fit the description you gave.

Does that mean that all fit that description? Of course not.

> Seems to me that one main advantage of OS products is 100% of the effort
> goes into the product's development. 

If a customer uses an OS product and pays programmers to do 
customization for their needs, 0% is going to go to product development.

If a customer pays an OS product support company to get help, 0% of that 
is going to go to product development.

If a company provides support for an OS product, then what is their 
incentive to improve the product in such a way that customers do not 
need to buy programmer or support hours to use it? To me this is one of 
the biggest flaws with the OS business model in general: there's no 
incentive for the developers to make it easy to use so that customers 
can be independent and self-reliant. If one makes money doing 
customizations and installation/configuration, then there is incentive 
to *not* make it easy to use.

By comparison, a company using a commercial license (such as myself) and 
which wishes to minimize support and customization needs (because we 
want to dedicate our hours to develop the product, which we believe is 
in the best interest of us and the customers) has a clear incentive to 
make it as easy to use as possible.

And this is, in fact, one of the main reasons why our customers find our 
product to be way way WAY cheaper than others, including OpenSource 
alternatives: because they don't have to spend tons of cash on getting 
consultants to make it work and/or maintain it.

> In the end, I think the best CMS is one built to fit an organizations
> specific needs. 

Just as having a programming language for each task would be perfect, as 
it would be specifically adapted to that particular task. Of course, 
you'd have no IDE's, no libraries, no books to help, and there's all 
sorts of other things you have to build yourself. But other than that it 
would be the best thing to do.

> I understand that that isn't always a viable option from
> a time/cost standpoint. In the end, however, I doubt a company is going
> to find that they can use a CMS product (OS or commercial) out of the
> gate with zero customization. 

(I love this part)

80%+ of our customers do zero customization of our CMS product to create 
their websites. It's all point and click. Unless you call that 
"customization" as well. But there's no coding necessary, and no 
creation of stylesheets or such things.

> Again, in the end, this is all MHO. Feel free to disagree...

I'm not so much disagreeing (because from your perspective with your 
experience it is quite possibly perfectly true), as much as I'm saying 
that what you describe is not necessarily applicable to all tools out 
there, ours included.

We use about 70+ OpenSource libraries in our product, so it's not that I 
don't like OpenSource. I'm just a little worried that people say that 
something is "cheap" because it's "OpenSource". Well, heck, we have cut 
our licensing prices by at least an order of magnitude since we can 
deliver functionality that is implemented using OpenSource libraries, so 
our customers get those warm and fuzzy OpenSource benefits as well!

best,
   Rickard