[SGVLUG] Questions about CMS's

[Braydon Fuller]

WordPress primarily feature has been for blogs. However since 3.0, 
things look to be moving to becoming more complicated and moving towards 
other types of posts. It's admin interface is designed to put most of 
the focus on what is the most current, which can be useful for any time 
of works that what is new is 90% of the time the most important. The 
downside is because most of the focus has been put on writing the PHP 
for the needs of the admin interface and other sacrifices have been 
made. Which is the reason it's successful with users and not as much 
with developers.

Drupal is a terrible CMS, and an excellent framework. It lacks a 
cohesive admin interface that makes documentation impossible, as well as 
building any cohesive interface between modules. It has a steep learning 
curve on all ends. It's modularity creates complexity without 
simplicity. Frameworks fill a niche, but combining framework and content 
management system is a undecided decision sitting around causing 
problems. The software should be written to the interface, not the 
interface written for the software. In the case with frameworks the 
interface becomes the software, but with more focus on that there is 
less focus on the interface for non-developers. Drupal is very popular 
with developers and not with users.

Joomla I would say it's strength is more flexibility an neutral stance 
for article based works, and has an admin interface. On the Python side, 
the Django admin interface is also another neutral one that works very 
well. I have seen people go from Dreamweaver to Joomla, but I'm still 
not convinced.

There is a bit of unfulfilled niche for sites that are mostly static, 
but could be benefited from a management system to reduce unnecessary 
complexities and duplication. There isn't a good solution to avoiding to 
learn HTML, because learning HTML has been for more useful for these 
situations. However if the website is designed with intention of 
maintaining a unique identity over a period of time, there should be 
some sort of graphic system established, and if there is, then 
handcoding isn't useful since there would be a pattern that software 
could replace, and make using that system effortless. That is unless 
there is a designer for every page, however doing that is unnecessary 
expensive to the current work-flow of designing comps and having a 
front-end developer write them. Many sites are maintained by people who 
know HTML well, the GNU website being an excellent example.

Securing WordPress websites has become a business, and likely an 
impossible problem to solve with it's current design, without totally 
changing how URL routing works, since wp-content is totally out in the 
open. Someone needs to go in a secure it, especially if you're using 
plugins.

-Braydon
http://braydon.com

On 03/04/2011 10:52 AM, Rae Yip wrote:
> The problem with CMSes is the level of time investment to learn the
> intricacies of any particular one is such that it's costly learn more
> than one or two to the same depth.
>
> I haven't been on any project that really required more than straight
> HTML plus some dynamic bits in perl, php, or python, plus version
> control. But most of those were webapps rather than content-heavy
> sites, and edited by coders.
>
> Wordpress, while popular (and visually clean), is notorious for
> security issues. Also I think Wordpress and MT fall more into the blog
> software category than true CMS, though I suppose some will disagree.
>
> -Rae.
>
> On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Tom Emerson<starman9x at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> I've recently been asked to update a website that looks to be "mostly
>> hand coded..."  I'm sure whoever built it originally used some sort of
>> design tool, but there are some oddities about the site - at one
>> point, it looks like any references to "news" were globally massacred
>> and turned into a link, even in the word "newspaper"...
>>
>> I'd like to use a proper CMS tool to maintain it going forward, even
>> though the site is 99% static.  The hosting company they use has
>> "wordpress" available, which appears to be very similar to movable
>> type, and thats my first question: what are the differences between
>> these two? (I've used MT for my own site, but I don't update it very
>> often)
>>
>> I would also consider joomla since I use that a bit more regularly ;)
>>
>> (and I know folks in the background are chanting "dru-pal, dru-pal, dru-PAL"...)
>>
>> the main purpose of the site is to promote the products the company
>> sells (they are a distributor), so the text for the products comes
>> from a parent site (that does not use RSS).  I'd like to make it easy
>> to update the text content without having to worry about layout,
>> links, and making "global" changes with unusual side effects...
>>
>> So, what would you suggest?  keep in mind I intend to use the current
>> site as a template, so the ability to import and update an existing
>> page layout is a plus.  The products they distribute are not updated
>> very often (maybe two years between updates?  yes, a very niche market
>> where the software doesn't need very many new "bells and whistles" to
>> keep up sales)
>>