Re: Website CMS questions

> 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.

This statement can be easily spun in the opposite direction:

There's no incentive for commercial CMS vendors to make their products
easy to use so that the customers can be independent and self-reliant as
that takes away from their lucrative annual 'maintenance and support'
contracts.

In the end, make a good product. That's all that matters. Whether it's
OS or not is less of an issue than the quality of the product. I find OS
a bit more approachable as it's a more transparent relationship, IMHO.

> 80%+ of our customers do zero customization of our CMS 
> product to create their websites. It's all point and click. 

You might be absolutely right...I haven't used your product. That said,
every time I see the 'point and click' statement in software sales
literature I become a bit suspect. More often than not, it's anything
but 'point and click'. Or, it may be point and click, but
technically/more accurately it's: point and click and point and click
and point and click and point and click and point and click and point
and click and test. Oh, you want it to work THAT way? Well,
simple...just tap into our API and write your own module. ;o)

> 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.

That's fair. Again, I've just been speaking from my own perspective and
from that of other's I've dealt with.

> 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, hold on...I never meant to imply it's 'cheap'. No matter the
product, it costs money to maintain, train, customize and deploy. No
argument there. With a CMS, my guess is that one's expense is going to
be moreso with internal staff getting them able to maintain content than
with any specific technology (depending on the org, of course).

I don't think it's ever fair to say OS is cheaper than Commercial or
vice versa by default. There are so many 'it depends' involved.

My recommendation is based solely on the 'try it out' phase. You can try
OS software without too much long-term commitment. A lot of commercial
software has that overhead of the initial licensing cost. I've seen a
lot of 'enterprise software' in use not because it's good, but because
'well, we paid for it'.

I got a few replies stating that not everyone has the money/time for the
'try it out' phase. I find that absurd. When shopping for software, it's
really hard to come up with a proper list of needs until one actually
gets to experience the product. No amount of planning can replace some
hands on interaction with the product.

I'd never buy a vehicle without taking it for a test drive, yet I see
companies purchasing software all the time and then dumping it in the
hands of IT and end-users. 

Now, if any of you are a commercial CMS company that makes a quality
product, sells it at a fair price, offers plenty of support and
peer-to-peer channels for said support, then feel free to ignore all of
my ranting. ;o)

-Darrel