[thelist] content management systems?

martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
Thu Feb 21 09:49:00 CST 2002


Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Subject:  Re: [thelist] content management systems?


>I use Zope as a "all in one" replacement of a custom made php solution.
>Altough it is not an out of the box cms, using for example the cmf
>(content management framework) can help a lot to build something on top
>of it.

...particularly if you're building a membership-based site where members
will publish in their own sandbox. The hard bit is making it not look like
an
a CMF site - while you can customise your own themes (info in the ZWACK
book), mostly they're pretty much the same as the default one.

>Imho all cms'es require a lot of customization anyway,

Yes, they will, as every site is different. Unless you have a site which is
so generic that you can do that with - many of those will either be simple
shopping catalogues/checkout or portals (hence the success of the
slashcode). Once you want to start attaching real content in any kind
of structure, you'll need to start being site-specific. Take a look at
http://www.malts.com/
Much of the shopping front-end functionality is pretty standard, although
of course, the products in question have their own data requirements,
but the rest of the site needed a lot of customised development.

>so it's better to
>roll you own tool using something like zope which lets you "construct"
>an app. using differents building blocks.
 Nearly all grown-up CMSs do this - they're toolkits which you need to
layer stuff on
top of which relate to your specific needs. And if they're half-way
sensible, then you
can define your own building blocks either from primitives (right the way
down to
Java/Python/Perl/VB/whatever code) or from their provided composites.

This will let you re-use a lot of code (which is why anything OOPish is
good) between
related sites... CM best practise suggests that you usually shouldn't need
separate
sites for Intranet(s), Extranet(s) and Internet sites as they're often just
different views
on the same content. You should just have content assets and apply a range
of
access rights and presentation rules to them.

The job of the CMS developer is normally that of an integrator - getting
everything
to play nicely together and integrate into whatever else needs to talk to
them. And
of course, you'll need to do a bit of customisation as mentioned above. But
that's absolutely not the same as writing a CMS from scratch. Doing that
for each
client sounds like a great way to burn budgets and timescales without much
benefit out of the end of it.

Most packaged CMSs and linked packaged products (eg Vignette, together with
Verity, as a front end to an ERP like SAP to pick a high-end product set,
and
similar bundles could be put together at a lower end) now can do*enough* of
the things you'll need for nearly any purpose (and almost *all* of the
supporting
functionality like searching, user/security management, workflow etc) that
unless
you want to compete as a vendor, you just wouldn't ever write one from
scratch
for a client.

Take the discussion we've just had on user login management with PHP. If
you have a CMS and you're worrying about getting that working, you're doing
something very, very wrong. While it may be interesting and useful to *see*
how your solution does this (particularly when evaluating products), you
wouldn't ever need to do it. Take Zope for example - you set up roles. You
set up actions users could do (and many are prebuilt). You assign users to
roles, and specify which roles can do which actions. And the rest is
taken care of. If it doesn't work, then you sue the vendor (or rather,
threaten
it, get a lump of cash in compensation and they fix it for you). Other than
the personal sense of achievement, why would you want to do that for
yourself? And why would a paying client want you to develop it from
scratch?

Cheers
Martin

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