Hate them or love them. There’s no in-between with content management systems. And love can swing to hate and back within the space of 10 minutes.
CMS are the pagination systems and printing presses of Web sites. If you know anything about them, they can drive you crazy. If you don’t know anything about them, they can drive you crazy.
CMS Talkfest in the Fred W. Smith Forum
Four of the six of us RJI Fellows needed to know more about CMS for our projects. We’ve done a bit of our own research, and a couple of us have even used a CMS or two. But, things are changing SO fast in Webworld that we were smart and yelled: “UNCLE!” The consulting group of BGVMedia jumped in to help.
BGVMedia comprises three online pioneers: Amy Webb, Adam Glenn, and Dorian Benkoil. About a year ago, they wrote a 67-page white paper called “Choosing the Right Content Management System for your Web Site(s),” which sells for $619. If you’re trying to figure out what CMS to choose for your news organization, and you’re confused by the plethora of choices, it’s worth every penny.
Even better than reading the white paper is to talk with them in person. Hence, on Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008, they starred in CMS Talkfest, the first of a series of Talkfests, or seminars, that the Reynolds Journalism Institute is hosting over the next few months about issues common to anyone who is putting together or running an online news organization.
The RJI Talkfest format is:
- fast-track...we can put a Talkfest together in two to four weeks;
- informal...we spread the word...anyone who can make it to Columbia is welcome;
- very participatory...people fill out a survey before the Talkfest so that the presenters are familiar with the issues teh group is facing and the questions they have
About 30 people showed up: most of the RJI Fellows, several UM School of Journalism faculty, representatives of the Missouri Press Association and the National Newspaper Association, and staff from RJI and the university’s IT department, which is grappling with choosing a CMS for the entire campus.
Among our burning questions:
Just how does a news organization choose a CMS? Before choosing a CMS, what questions should you ask? How are CMS evolving as the Internet becomes increasingly multimedia and serving mobile devices? Is it possible to have a single CMS that integrates all the business, editorial, marketing, social networking and technical needs of a multi-platform news organization?
The highlights:
There are three ways to do CMS: open-source, enterprise and a category that Amy Webb, who did the bulk of the presentation, calls “getting creative.”
- Open source is a free CMS, something like Drupal or Django. But it’s not really free. They’re still pretty complicated, so you need to hire a programmer or programming team (depending on how large your site or sites are). That costs money. Advantages: usually cheaper than an enterprise solution, quicker from idea to launch, and can keep up with changes.
- Enterprise CMS, proprietary systems such as Saxotech or Clickability. They’re expensive. A robust news organization can spend $150K for setup and $90K for annual maintenance and upgrades. Advantages: terrific work flow management from story idea to Web distribution or pagination and printing. Enterprise systems do it all. Their limitations: they’re not as quick to adapt to new Web developments.
- "Getting creative” means cobbling together a site, a blog, a Ning network, a wiki, etc. For a growing and serious news organization, this becomes a little cumbersome, because people may have to use a separate sign-in for each part.
How do you choose a CMS?
The most important thing in figuring out which CMS type and vendor to choose is to do a thorough analysis of the site you’re developing, says Webb. Make a list of every function that your Web site needs to do. You should have a detailed, page-by-page, function-by-function handbook to the entire site. It should be about 50 to 60 pages long. Design comes AFTER you figure out what you want your site to do.
Questions to ask:
- Do you have technical staff with enough knowledge and time to work with an open-source system?
- Are you on a tight launch deadline? (if so, hire a company)
- Have you budgeted for pre-launch, post-launch fixes and ongoing maintenance?
- Are you a single or multi-site shop?
- Will your site be mobi-compliant…i.e. content for mobile phones, too?
- Are you preparing for semantic tags and social networking?
Talkfest Presenters:
We invited three vendors to show the latest bells and whistles of their CMS systems:
- Steve Yelvington, from Morris Digital Works. He did a presentation remotely, from Jacksonville, FL, where he’s training the folks at Jacksonville.com, the Florida Times-Union’s Web site, to use the new CMS they built with Drupal.
- Richard Anderson, from VillageSoup. The Knight Foundation gave Richard $800,000 to develop a CMS for small news organizations whose communities number 30,000 or fewer.
- Dan Cox and Ralph Gage from Mediaphormedia, the World Publishing Company’s CMS development division. Their proprietary system, Ellington, is built on the open-source CMS Django.
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