Megan Taylor

front-end dev, volunteacher, news & data junkie, bibliophile, Flyers fan, sci-fi geek and kitteh servant

Link roundup: On the future of the CMS

Read this:

WHEN WEBSITES STOPPED BEING THINGS

and this:

THE POST-CMS CMS

and these:

The Twilight of the CMS

The post-post-CMS CMS: Loosely coupled monoliths & read-only APIs

ON APIS, VANITY AND LOOSE COUPLING

Read all the things these articles link to. There are probably more I haven’t seen. Think about what they’re saying. Somewhere in there is the solution to publishing tools that real people can use, with the flexibility that real programmers can love.

EDIT: Now I have to give Stijn Debrouwere at least half the credit for this post, if not more. His comments are below. Click on all the links. Read. Think. Do.

Stijn Debrouwere

I would definitely add Matt Waite’s Nieman Lab piece from earlier, in March ’11: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/matt-waite-to-build-a-digital-future-for-news-developers-have-to-be-able-to-hack-at-the-core-of-the-old-ways/

And for people with lots of time on their hands:

http://packages.python.org/Deliverance/philosophy.html
http://gadgetopia.com/post/7208
http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/10/13/cope-create-once-publish-everywhere/
http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/blog/2010/nov/24/argo-network/

One caveat that I would like to state, though, for people just now tuning in, is that this discussion is centered entirely around big news websites.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with WordPress or Drupal for 90 percent of the use-cases out there, it’s just that news production really stretches what’s possible with a CMS, which is why we’re having these discussions. As I stated elsewhere: perhaps this’ll one day become the easy option, but right now post-CMS implies putting a lot of time, money and expertise into doing things differently because it feels like the right way to go, not because it’s an intuitively attractive option.

So as you say, the aim is definitely to make web publishing less insane and friendlier for real people, but real people in this case rather narrowly refers to journalists in a newsroom. For now, at least.
- Megan Taylor
  
  While the discussion is around big news sites, I think the concepts are applicable to a lot of other big sites. Would love to have something like what’s being discussed at the non-profit I work for. Our CMS is like carving in stone tablets.
- Stijn Debrouwere
  
  And actually, I would also add these.
  
  1. About websites as confederations (which is 90% of the post-CMS discussion): http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/digital-strategies/134791/4-ways-content-management-systems-are-evolving-why-it-matters-to-journalists/2. About other ways CMSes need to change:http://www.maxcutler.com/2010/09/13/what-is-a-news-cmshttp://seanblanda.com/blog/feature/if-all-you-want-is-a-cms-youre-doing-it-wrong/3. Why CMSes often suck: http://hackshackers.com/blog/2010/04/13/dont-mistake-your-cms-for-a-development-platform/http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/content-management-systems-just-dont-work/Three cheers for my Delicious account :-)