Re: CMS Differentiating Factors

On 05.10.2005, at 19:08, John wrote:

>  Hello again,
>
>  I understand that there are something like 1300 CMS products on the 
> market and only about 30% featureset overlap between these products.  
> This would seem to make it almost impossible to select a CMS.  I am 
> doing general research on this subject, but I am interested in input 
> from experienced users, developers and administrators regarding the 
> most important features which differentiate one CMS from another, from 
> very generic things like support or enforcement for web standards and 
> accessibility to very concrete and specific things such as support for 
> XSL 2.0.  Feel free to include information about specific vendors, but 
> I am mostly looking for more generic input.  I wouldn't mind if this 
> turns into a general discussion on CMS selection criteria, though I'm 
> sure that has been covered elsewhere.

As the project lead of one open source CMS I have the following notes 
in no particular order:

* JSR-170 - a new standard for content repositories (based on Java for 
the moment) provides one API for all data, lets you move data 
painlessly from one system to the other etc.
* ease of use
* cost
* flexibility
* vendor lock in avoidance factor
* product philosophy

Technology is overrated. Either its stuff that is very common (lets say 
RSS) and therefore well documented and widely available, so that you 
can add it yourself if its missing, or its a special thing that most 
likely is cheaper to do yourself anyways than buy from a "big" vendor 
and then customize it.

 From our experience (before we started Magnolia) I can say
a) customization is always necessary to some degree unless your 
requirements are low or your company is average (in the sense of "like 
most others") because vendors will usually built what most companies 
(== average) need
b) its a pain (or expensive - depending on your perspective) to 
customize systems where code is not available

Regards
Boris Kraft
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Magnolia Content Management
http://www.magnolia.info/
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