[thelist] Do I need a CMS

[Martin Burns]

On Thursday, June 13, 2002, at 08:03  pm, Hershel Robinson wrote:

> I am building a site now with an Articles section.  This Articles
> section
> will contain the approx 1000 articles the site owner has written in MS
> Word.
> I have a utility to convert them (en masse) to HTML and I am writing a
> Perl
> script to strip off everything from these HTML files but the actual
> article
> text.  The articles are divided into categories and some of the
> categories
> are divided into subcategories.
>
> My question is what do people think of my writing a simple CGI Perl
> script
> (and an Access database) to handle producing (in real time) category,
> sub-category and actual article pages?  I'll just keep pointers in the
> database to all the files and then output article pages with the desired
> HTML look before and after the article.  Does anyone think I need
> something
> more sophisticated?
>
> The site owner writes articles for different publications occasionally
> and
> so there will be more articles to add, but I don't think any real
> volume of
> them.  If there was one a week I would be surprised.  To add new
> articles, I
> could just use the same semi-automated process of convert, strip and
> add to
> the database.

Hi Herschel

While Steve covered most of what I was going to say anyway, here's a few
questions/thoughts:

1) What's the likely traffic? Access doesn't handle loads very well
2) Could your script just rebuild static index pages when a new article
is launched?
3) Who's going to be adding new pages? Do you want a manual process
which only you can operate?
4) What's the sign-off process - does the client want to check every
article before it goes live, or will they just trust you?
5) How much of this will be true in a year's time? And if 'enough to
make a difference', how open is the client to paying someone/you to
reengineer it?

Take a look at my article:
http://evolt.org/CMS_for_business/
specifically at the checklists at the bottom

Last thing - Steve's right, a better question is "how much CMS do I
need". It might be that what you're proposing could be handled by a
high-spec blog, or a CMS which *doesn't* cost an arm and a leg (eg
Zope - my own site runs on Zope and auto-indexes pages in some places,
based on an 'isLive' flag and launch/expire dates)

Cheers
Martin
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