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Read it, comment, and share it with your friendsIt says a lot for Wordpress
I’ve been looking at various open-source content management systems for the past week… mostly on opensourcecms.com, where you can preview a ton of PHP/MySQL CMS’s. There’s a few good ones out there, but there’s a lot of junk too. What amazes me, however, is how many of these CMS’s do the same things… pages, groups, users, permissions, files, templates, modules. They all have different administration interfaces, maybe use different PHP classes, but you still get the feeling that every one of them is just reinventing the same wheel.
Now this isn’t to say anything bad about the majority of open-source PHP CMS’s out there, but I got to thinking… I can see why so many designers and developers use Wordpress to publish sites that are nothing like blogs. All of these CMS’s have rather complicated administration interfaces, tend to be difficult to theme, and usually don’t put as much emphasis on syndicated publishing as blogging software. It’s really interesting when you think about it; after all, on a typical website you might publish a couple handfuls of static pages, whereas you might have a fresh news posting every week. Doesn’t it make sense for a platform to emphasize news/blog content over static pages? Moreover, if you are going to hand something over to a client, it’s natural to opt for something that non-technical people can use (and do every day). When I tell people “updating this site is just like updating your Livejournal/Xanga,” that’s one of the great things about Wordpress. It’s the combination of the simple admin interface and the focus on blogging (even when the end result is not a blog) that makes Wordpress ideal for most simple sites that I would build for a client.
For the record, there’s a limit to what Wordpress is really suited for and I’ve opted to use CMS Made Simple for a client project that requires user-management and member-restricted content, mostly because the administration interface for CMSMS is relatively good. That being said, however, I think more developers should take a look at the Wordpress administration interface and think about why it happens to be so successful… it doesn’t contain an overload of AJAX and doesn’t overwhelm the user with options. After all, content management systems shouldn’t just be about offering more features and functionality for the developer, but being user-friendly for the client too.
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Responses to my articleHey there,
Our CMS, SilverStripe, was built to tackle the sort of UI-complexity issues that you’ve mentioned in your article. I’d appreciate your feedback on the system.
Site: www.silverstripe.com
Demo: demo.silverstripe.com
Thanks,
Sam Minnee
Lead Developer, SilverStripe
Hi Sam. I did have a look at SilverStripe and there were three things that bothered me:
I’ll admit that the admin interface is well designed and the system as a whole is very polished, but I think CMS Made Simple fits the things I want to do a bit better.
This is VERY reassuring to me, Christian. I’m using WordPress for my website, and my whole purpose is to convince people that I’m some sort of content maintenance guru! It’s nice to know I’m not on the wrong track completely.
Thanks for your feedback, Christian. I’d be interested to hear more about what you have to say about the separation of syndicated content in the authoring system.
By “syndicated content”, do you mean RSS feeds from other sites, or differentiating the blog/news-area from rest of the site in the interface. Our goal with keeping everything in the same interface was to keep things simple - why have 2 interfaces when 1 would do? What do you see as being the advantage of having your blog/etc separated out in the interface?
Automatic generation of RSS feeds on every “content-listing page” is a good idea and we’ll look at that for the next release.
The templates are administered on the filesystem directly. The idea is that the designer/developer has one job and the author has a very different job. The designer/developer does their job in CSS/PHP/Template files on the file system, rather than the authoring interface. This lets us keep the authoring interface clean and simple. However, we could improve upon this by having a ‘designer level log-in’ that lets you edit templates directly in the system. We’ll look into this for a future release.
The drag’n'drop reorganising of the site-tree is one of the things that would be near impossible without ajax. Your comments on load-time are valid; we’re going to look at performance in the next couple of releases.
Ultimately, you’re right when you say that CMS Made Simple is the best tool for the job. However, it’s always interesting to hear what these cases are, so we can improve our product over time.
Sam, by syndicated content I do mean the “blog/news” areas. I can understand that it simplifies things to administer this and static pages in one place, but the two can be very different. Static content might not change throughout the life of the site, and doesn’t have things like categories, tags, trackbacks, and future posting which are exclusive to syndicated publishing. Admittedly I do like the way SilverStripe makes it easy to generate multiple sections with syndicated articles, but I think the problem lies in the fact that those articles aren’t treated very differently from static pages.
As for having a “designer level log-in,” I think that would be a great idea, especially since sometimes the designer and the developer aren’t the same person.
And I understand that there are features in the administration system that would be impossible without Ajax, but I think it’s the different between Wordpress, where Ajax is used sparingly for small requests, and SilverStripe, where it is used for everything. At some point the Javascript grows to be so massive that it no longer saves time.
To be honest, though, if any one open-source CMS would give some serious attention to “front-end” user management and registration, as well as easy control of which pages are public and which require membership to view, I would support that CMS in a heartbeat. Maybe SilverStripe can make this a feature?
When you say “front-end” user managers, you mean the log-in system for people who aren’t editing the site’s content - for things like discussion forums and stuff? This is something that we’ll be looking at in version 2.1.
We’ll also look into ways of differentiating syndicated content a little more explicitly - for example, by using different icons, and presenting different entry fields & action buttons when you click on a blog entry.
I’ll bookmark your blog and let you know when version 2.1 has been released.
Exactly Sam, “member” users who don’t have access to the back-end. I’ll be looking forward to both of the features you mentioned. Thanks!
There are a lot of things that I don’t like about WordPress, this being part of the reason why I chose to go my own way with my website/s and “reinvent the wheel” as it is so commonly referred to (I hate that term). That said, I would never release my source code for my blog/CMS to the public because (apart from security reasons — private code is harder to crack than public) there’s just no point. When there are CMSs out there like WordPress that can provide a better, more user-friendly environment I’d be wasting my time.
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