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Perch - A Really Little Content Management System (CMS)
Simple and clean little PHP-based CMS from Drew and Rachel edgeofmyseat.com. Looks really nice for those simple projects that don’t need something heavier.
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django-cms
django-cms is a new CMS for Django. Although it’s quite interesting, it’s totally not what I would want in a CMS. I’m a fan of structured data, rather than simple “add a page of text” sort of CMSes. But, it’s definitely well-done, so if that’s what you’re looking for, check it out. Even if it’s not what you’re looking for, be sure to check out the demo and the modifications to the Django admin interface. Quite interesting.
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Build a Custom CMS with Django: My Carson Workshop
I’ll be heading over to London, my favorite city in the world (so far, anyway), to give a full-day workshop on building a custom CMS using Django. The workshop is being put on my the awesome folks at Carsonified, and you can register right now, if you like! Having been to several Carsonified events, I can say with a great deal of certainty that no one out there runs conferences and workshops more smoothly than this crew. Should be a great day.
I will definitely blog at more length about this event in the near future, but for now, head over to the Carson Workshops site and check it out.
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Mike Davidson: Enterprise CMSes vs. Blog CMSes
A good discussion ensures after Mike asks a simple question: for news organizations, which is better, a blog CMS or an enterprise CMS? My answer? They both suck.
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ExpressionEngine 2.0 Preview
For those of us who didn’t make it to the ElisLabs sessions at SXSW.
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Me at Blue Flavor blog: Choosing a Content Management System for your web project
I’ve written a lengthy post on CMSes and how to pick the right one for your site. You can find it over at the Blue Flavor blog. Check it out.
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Patrick H. Lauke: The artisan and the mass producer
Patrick really hits the nail on the head in this piece originally written for the UK’s .net magazine. He touches on a lot of the ideas I’ve been spouting off about around here lately — in particular, the fact that sometimes less-than-perfect is “good enough,” and in fact that sometimes having your designer focus on the big picture is a lot more valuable than having your designer spend his/her time making sure ampersands are encoded and every links has a
titleattribute. A few choice quotes:As an accessibilista and web standards evangelist, I admit that this prospect seems anathema to the ideology I’ve been advocating for years. However, the pragmatist in me is willing to make certain small concessions when it comes to the purity and finesse of markup and styling if these are outweighed by increased production capacity and faster turnaround times, which ultimately aid in keeping a large content-driven site accurate and up-to-date.
…web authors should see content management systems as opportunities. Just as CSS frameworks and JavaScript libraries, they are simply tools that, when judiciously applied, can greatly enhance productivity by automating repetitive and mundane tasks. The creative act of crafting appropriate templates still requires technical expertise.
…any tool which can enable us to work smarter, not harder, should be seen in a positive light.
Bravo, Patrick. One of my favorite articles in quite a little while See also the super-sexy PDF version.
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Newspaper Wiki: Schematics
Some really interesting ideas on workflow and business process for online news. I’m still not sold on the idea of using a wiki for a news CMS, but a lot of the concepts involved could be applied in other types of CMSes, as well.
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O’Reilly Radar: Journalism Through Computer Programming
This quick O’Reilly blog post notes a very important point: people are looking for cookie-cutter solutions to the CMS problem. Adrian Holovaty wants to set them straight; you need a CMS for your data, and that can’t be provided by an off-the-shelf CMS.
People often ask me, for example, if they can use the code for my personal CMS. They’re missing the point. The personal CMS I’ve written is very much tailored to me — it wouldn’t be very useful to you. You need one tailored to you, just like I need one tailored to me. The same holds true for professional-level CMSes. Our Ellington CMS works well as a news publishing platform because it’s uniquely tailored to what news organizations do and the kind of data they deal with. It wouldn’t be very efficient, say, for powering a personal website. Cookie-cutter solutions just don’t work very well in most cases.
Luckily, Django makes it very easy for you to “roll your own”. :)
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Relaunch.
Let me get this out of the way upfront: It’s not done.
That having been said, I’ve relaunched my site on an entirely new codebase, and given it a slight design makeover, as well. As you may know if you follow this site and Django, the May reboot version of jeffcroft.com was based on a CMS I wrote when I was very new to Python and Django, using Django .91 — which is pre-magic-removal, in Django parlance.
I’m happy to say that all magic on jeffcroft.com has been removed.
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Scripps adds 2 more Ellington sites : Small Initiatives - Sensible Internet Design
With the rollout of the San Angelo Standard-Times (Texas) and Anderson Independent-Mail (South Carolina) papers, Scripps now has 11 of its papers running the Ellington CMS, which is based on the Django framework. I’m not quite sure what the total number of news and entertainment websites under Ellington is, but it’s go to be pushing 30 by now — which is about 25 more than this time last year, by my count.
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D. Keith Robinson podcast interview
Brian Oberkirch interviews DKR on several topics, perhaps the most interesting of which is content management. I love that Keith is constantly reminding everyone that content management is a process, which may or may not actually require a piece of CMS software. Figure out your business processes first, and then determine what you need technically to make them work. Most people want to talk about technology way too early on in the process. Oh, and thanks for the shout-out, Keith. :)
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D. Keith Robnison: Redefining content management
A great article on what content management means to most people compared to what it should mean, and some ideas on developing systems (not just technology) to make content management work for you.
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How to turn a normal WordPress installation into a working online shop
This is linked for all those people who told me that WordPress was capable of handling sites that weren’t blogs. If this is what you mean by “handling,” then I laugh in your general direction. Blogging apps are for blogs. Want a shopping cart? Get a shopping cart app. Using a blogging app for a shopping cart can only be described one way: ugly hack. Thanks for the link, Tim!
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On personal content management
Working in the online news media industry, I got into a lot of conversations about content management. Turns out it’s a tricky problem to solve. There are a lot of factors involved, and they start as simple as trying to define what exactly content management is.
Seems to me when most people think of a content management system for the web, they think of data entry. Web forms that let one enter data, which will eventually be displayed on a web page — right? Right. But really, content management should be about more than that. The process of managing your content ought to include structuring, organizing, searching on, filtering, and easily modifying your content. It ought to include being able to quickly define new types of content. It ought to facilitate establishing meaningful relationships between disparate pieces of content. It ought to make your content more useful simply by virtue of the content being in the system.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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