But the biggest problem is not with the core. A little bit of hacking can get around that. The bigger problem is the poorly coded extensions (plugins, components, modules). Running a website off an open-source CMS means you almost invariably are going to need to rely on 3rd party extensions, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

What’s wrong is the shoddy state of Joomla’s extension landscape. Credit to the extension authors is of course due more than blame, as they’re working (generally) for free, out of goodwill. But having to re-work over the HTML generated by pretty much each and every extension–whether it’s removing tables used for layout, getting rid of deprecated elements and attributes, or just fixing plain old errors–gets tedious quickly. People should know better than to just throw <style> tags into the middle of a document. I shouldn’t be seeing  <td align="center"> anywere.

Last time I played around with SilverStripe, it seemed like a pretty solid CMS (outputs valid XHTML, easily templatable, etc.) and I probably would have used it in a production site I was doing at the time, but I had trouble with the WYSIWYG javascript file uploader in Safari, which was the browser of choice for the client.

I imagine they’ve fixed the issue now though, so if you’re a developer and looking for alternatives to Joomla!/Drupal, check out SilverStripe.

At the same time, there are the more common complaints that tend to prompt talk of redesign: getting sick of the stock photos, moving from a bunch of Dreamweaver-edited static XHTML pages to a CMS, leveraging some better metadata systems and content linking logic for a lot of older but still very relevant content, adding e-commerce capability, etc.

So, as part of the process towards creating some consultant RFPs and/or strategy documents, we’ve been doing some exploration into the world of content management systems. Though I think we’ve had the inkling from the start that we were going to go with Drupal, it’s been worthwhile looking into some other options and seeing what people have to say about CMSs in general. Particularly interesting has been looking back at articles on CMSs from three, four and even five years ago and seeing what’s stayed the same and what’s changed.

First in this mini-retrospective, we have Making Your Content Management System Work for You: An Interview with Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path, from 2004. While there’s a lot of advice in here that’s still relevant, like starting simple and leaving room for complexity growth, and focusing on the editorial and metadata people during a CMS installation, I can’t imagine anyone saying today,

90 percent of the web sites don’t need the complex features of a CMS

In my experience, a CMS is exactly what 90 percent of websites need. Especially in the small-business and NGO world where you likely don’t have the time or human resources to have someone manually updating the pages on your site. If we’re talking about overly complex or bloated or enterprise-level CMSs, then I would agree with the above statement, but fortunately there’s an ever expanding list of free/open-source and reasonably priced CMSs that offer lower and lower entry barriers into this world.

The second article of note that I came across was the not-so-subtly-titled, Study: Content Management Tools Fail, from 2003. Some choice quotations from this one:

The report found the bulk of companies surveyed felt they overspent on content management platforms, and the tools in those platforms are under-deployed. Sixty-one percent of the surveyed companies said they still rely on manual processes to update their Web sites…

In addition, a recent Jupiter Executive Survey showed close to half of the respondents felt their deployments of content management platforms “barely scratched the surface of the functionality they originally licensed.”

Unfortunately, these experiences will probably still resonate with many modern-day CMS users. There is the temptation to go for the Cadillac when all you really need is the Corolla, and without proper implementation many of the most useful features of modern CMSs, like their ability to automatically leverage relationships between related content, will site idle. In addition to implementation, training, even on apparently straightforward issues like how to use the TinyMCE (or equivalent) editor, is crucial to success but is often neglected.

Some other typical CMS problems are highlighted in this boxes and arrows article, Managing the Complexity of Content Management, by Victor Lombardi, from 2004 that draws on the results of this IA Institute study, the Problems with CMS. To my knowledge, a study like this hasn’t been conducted recently, but I imagine the results would be similar, though hopefully somewhat lower on all measures as CMS vendors have attempted to respond to customer’s frustrations in the interim. Lombardi’s article has some more great advice on “buying the right size”, and “creating and efficient information architecture,” and I have to say that the two or three most common problems identified (expense, complexity, and training) are precisely the reasons why I like to recommend Wordpress or Joomla! which are both open-source and relatively easy to use even for people with little technological background.

Lastly, we have CMS and the Single Web Designer from A List Apart, by James Ellis, writing in 2002. Discussing the evolving role of the in-house web designer who faces the increasing adoption of CMSs, Ellis warns that implementing a CMS is like outsourcing many of the typical functions performed by the “web generalist” and that many organizations may reconsider their need for an in-house designer.

While I don’t have any statistics on this (though perhaps when some more data is available for trending something like this could be pulled from A List Apart’s Survey for People Who Make Websites), my hunch is that the web generalist’s time in the sun is not yet over. Speaking solely from personal experience with working for and volunteering with small- to mid-sized NGOs (budgets ranging from a few 100k to several million), I can say while need for a full-time webmaster is probably drying up, everyone seems to be in constant need of an in-house staff person who is capable of some amount of web design and/or development, because nearly everyone seems to have encountered any number of the following situations on a fairly regular basis:

• need to make a slight typographical change to an image, and no longer have the original PSD (or whatever) files–web generalist opens up Photoshop, makes the alteration, saves time and $$$ of going to a professional designer
• need to fix some bad (X)HTML that the CMS javascript-powered editor is spitting out–web generalist either conducts appropriate training, fixes output, or tweaks the editor itself
• organization has RSS feed that doesn’t aggregate everything it should, or doesn’t validate–web generalist to the rescue
• organization wants to host some multimedia but thinks it’s too expensive–web generalist says, Hey, ever heard of Amazon S3?

The list could be significantly extended.

That wraps it up, I think, for now. On balance, I’d say that the articles outlined above are still quite relevant to the world of CMSs and webmastering today. If anyone out there in blog-reader land knows about more recent CMS user experience survey data, I’d be really interested to know. If it’s not out there, it would certainly make a worthwhile study–I’d say, particularly with a focus on smaller scale organizational users because I think CMS Watch puts enough dough into the enterprise-level CMS research field.

But first a word about plugin security. Unfortunately, Wordpress plugins have a bit of a reputation for being insecure, due largely though not exclusively to the lack of proper sanitation of user input. Neglecting to check whether a user has entered malicious code into an input field into a form, for example, or tacked it onto the end of a query string can leave your server vulnerable to SQL injection and similar attacks. With that in mind, it’s prudent to check around for any security issues with a plugin before you install. If you have the PHP skills, you perhaps check the plugin yourself for any code that might leave your system open to being compromised.

But that aside, there are many secure and well-tested Wordpress plugins, as well as many (perhaps most?) that do not introduce any user-interaction features beyond the Wordpress core and thus aren’t even really candidates for opening up additional security holes. The following is a list of just a few.

Forms

Whether you need a contact form, a form that allows prospective clients to get a quick sample quote, or even rudimentary e-commerce functionality, chances are your site is going to need a form somewhere along the line. Wordpress has a series of form plugins that all provide basically the same functionality, providing a simple GUI allowing you to create form inputs, buttons, and some amount of validation logic without having to know any HTML or server-side programming language.

The two that I have some experience with (FormBuilder and CFormsII) both do what is mentioned above, but the similarities pretty much end there. In my experience, CFormsII not only provides much more functionality, but also generates nice, clean HTML and has a helpful set of default CSS templates that can help layout your form pretty nicely without too much (or any at all) tweaking.

Sitemap

A sitemap is somewhat of an information architecture best practice. It can be a helpful last resort if primary navigation and search aren’t working for a user, or can even be a first resort for power users if they know how to use the sitemap to bypass several clicks through a deep navigation hierarchy.

I’m using Dagon Design’s sitemap generator for a site I’m currently working on and, while it doesn’t have a lot of functionality nor does it provide particularly fine-grained control over the output, it gets the job done (which is more than I can say for all the Joomla! 1.5 sitemap plugins I’ve tried, though my last effort at that was about 4 months ago).

Page Order

No doubt about it, if you’re running a CMS you’re going to need to have control over the order in which your pages appear in lists and menus. Wordpress has a built in system for doing this, but it’s a very recent addition and is pretty unwieldy (though I’m sure they’ll be improving it in the near future). The My Page Order plugin provides a simple way of getting the control you need.

Incidentally, plugins aren’t the only way you can easily get more control over how pages are listed (or other core functionality). One way (hackish but it works) is to take the Wordpress function you want to tweak, copy+paste the file into your template’s functions.php file, change the function name (e.g. if your theme is called greattheme you could change the wp_list_pages() function to gt_wp_list_pages()) and make whatever little alterations you need.

For example, in a site I’m working on, the standard wp_list_pages() along with some key/value pairs (wp_list_pages(array('title_li' => '', 'meta_key'=>'page-type', 'meta_value'=>'global-nav'))) was working for me, except I wanted to put a link to the homepage at the beginning of the list.

The easiest way for me to do this, without hard-coding the list into the template (and thereby losing Wordpress’s handy way of adding classes to the currently active page and its parent/ancestors) was to copy wp_list_pages() into my functions.php and insert the following line:

$output .= '<li class="page_item"><a href="'.get_option('home').'">Home</a></li>';

Semantic Web

There is a small but growing offering of Wordpress plugins that can add some Semantic Web goodness to your site. One of these is the Dublin Core plugin, which offers a no-nonsense implementation of a subset of the Dublin Core Metadata Terms for your Wordpress site.

While Wordpress is certainly not your best choice if you’re looking to create a complex site powered by a set of linking rules that relate pieces of content to each other via metadata, I think implementing the Dublin Core is a good idea even if you don’t find some clever way to directly take advantage of it: even small steps like this take us further towards the semantic web (or Semantic Web, if you like).

That’s it

That’s it for now. There probably won’t be another post in this mini-series, but I’m thinking of doing another comparing Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal and discussing the situations in which they would be appropriate CMS choices. That probably won’t happen for a while, though.

For examples of how to do this the right way, you could point to the web apps done by 37signals (e.g. Backpack), or to Wordpress. Over the years, Wordpress has continued to grow and to integrate new features, but has done a fairly good job of not allowing them to clutter core functionality. Following good usability principles like progressive disclosure means newbie users can jump right in and do what they want, while you don’t alienate advanced users by babying them with an impoverished interface.

A quick Google search for the terms “wordpress cms” reveals a plethora results, and the Wordpress developers are aware that many people are using Wordpress for much more than out of the box blogging. With that in mind, they continue to roll out functionality that makes it easier to use the platform as a content management system that can accomplish most of what you would want from your CMS.

Some of these features that you will find useful if not crucial to using Wordpress as a CMS include:

• the option to set a static or fixed homepage
  Prior to Wordpress 2.1, you had to either hack around and create and upload a new homepage, or use a Wordpress plugin to accomplish the same thing in a slightly more graceful way. Now, setting up a static homepage is as simple as going to the Settings > Reading panel and making the choice there. For more information, see Creating a Static Front Page
• custom fields
  custom fields allow you to associate information with a post that goes beyond the parameters given to you by Wordpress. Suppose, for instance, that you’re creating a Wordpress site in which certain products for sale will be entered into the database as posts. Well, you’re going to want to store a bunch of particular information that will be associated with each product/post, including cost, availability, shipping, sizes, and so on.
  Using custom fields, you would type in a new key (say, “availability”) and then under the value, you would enter either “available” or “sold”. Then, when editing say, single.php (the wordpress template for single posts) you would access the data like so, from within the Loop:<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'availability', true); ?>If you wanted to make this data available outside of the Loop (e.g., in your sidebar), you would just type <?php global $availability; $availability = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'availability', true); ?>And then in sidebar.php, you would include <?php global $availability; echo $availability; ?>
• page order
  Wordpress has only recently added the ability to define the order of your page manually, rather than using the options Wordpress provides for wp_list_pages(), which are to sort by alphabetical order, or to sort by id. Though the functionality is new (and still a bit “janky” according to Wordpress), it’s nice to know you won’t have to rely on third party plugins for such standard CMS features

In the next installment, I’ll discuss a couple more essential pieces for using Wordpress as a CMS, including page templates, and also go further into third party plugins.

One powerful reason to make wordpress your CMS of choice is its ease of use. While Joomla!, Drupal and the like are all excellent CMSs, none of them prioritize simplicity to the same degree that Wordpress does. This isn’t as much of a criticism as it sounds like–there is an inevitable trade-off between the available features and power of a piece of software and its out-of-the-box, so-easy-your-dog-could-do-it usability. Wordpress is a platform for the unwashed blogging masses, while Joomla! and Drupal are fully-fledged CMSs that compare favourably with any enterprise-level solution you’d pay thousands of dollars for. Each understands its user-base and its niche and guides software development accordingly.

But in addition to being suitable for the masses, Wordpress is a great choice if you’re doing a website for a client who either is a) not as comfortable with new technology; or b) has little time and is someone for whom the need to learn how to navigate a complicated CMS admin panel will be a significant barrier to actually using it. You can easily teach someone the Wordpress “basics and then some” in an hour, which means satisfaction both for the client and for you (imagine all the support email questions you *won’t* be getting!).

That’s it for the first part of this mini-series. In the next post, I’ll dig in to some more technical issues and look at how recent advancements in the Wordpress platform are increasingly making it a viable CMS solution.