Content Management Systems (CMS)

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Permalink Reply by OlegR on July 26, 2008 at 9:55am

There’s an old saying — pay me now or pay me later. Pay for software — and pay less for development — or pay for development and pay less for software. Reality is you need to pay more for one or there other. A supported solution will cost more than free — because it allows you to do what you are best at doing: publishing.

When considering pricing consider the following: If you open a boutique in any major city — you have the cost of the rent, the personnel to work, the lights, the electricity, the merchandising — and of course the inventory. Can you imagine doing this for less than $300,000?

The weird thing with online is, people think they are going to build an infrastructure, that will return millions of dollars ... For free. I am not putting down open source — in fact our solution is based on an open source — meaning it is completely flexible. But with a low cost solution you end up with either a fully flexible system that requires tons of programming time to customize and secure it, or a more rigid system that costs little to operate — but which locks you into today’s feature set — for the longterm. A higher end system like ours, will offer both flexibility and stability — without needing an army to constantly be adapting software.

As a publisher, only you can decide if you want to invest in software once or technology building for the foreseeable future.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Iannone on July 28, 2008 at 1:57pm

Folks

Just to be clear here -- No selling or pitching your products here. Its fine for vendors to be included in the discussion about CMS in general, but if you pitch your own products here directly in the forum, your post will be removed and account subject to termination.

Dave

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Permalink Reply by OlegR on July 30, 2008 at 3:10pm

Hi Greyson,

Sharepoint is not a publishing CMS... I doubt any publisher is using it or is looking at it as a system for deploying their websites.

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Permalink Reply by OlegR on July 30, 2008 at 3:32pm

Let's keep this thread neat and to the point :) ok?

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Permalink Reply by Pablo Ferrero on September 29, 2008 at 12:57pm

Hi to all in the topic,
We do a magazine in Ireland, and we also built the online presence, we have a long experience with CMS system and we tested nearly all of them in real situations, so I can give you a good reference of what you can do with them and the costs that are involved in launching your new site.

Firs of all you need to know what you want to do with your site, this is the key first step, if you don't know exactly what you want you probably finish with something useless in a couple of month, so here you have to decide if you want to publish the full content of your publication, if you want an online subscription system, if you want to create an online community, etc. all have to be clear before you talk to a developer.

Once you have that, you have run 40% of the project, now you have to create it, so you need a developer, he must recommend you the correct platform you will need to achieve your target, today there are a lot of system that you can use in the open source world, so you can use them for free but having the system in your hands doesn't build your website, you need someone to work on that system and create what you need, and this will cost money, you can start from 500 for a midlevel coder and designer from India, up to 10000 Euros for an expert no matter where you hire him.

Remember you need someone who can design the GUI or Graphic user interface, and code or build the hole system, so a Designer and a Coder must be involved to create a nice working site.

Also remember you are working on an open source system, this means the system prepare to do something, and if you want to do something different that system may not work for you, so is very important the first step.

An other important point is that you don't want to depend on your developer to update and maintain your website, so is very important the a user friendly CMS system, your developer must recommend you the correct one, and also train you in how to update your site after the site is done, always a 2 hours course is enough to have you running.

A very simple CMS can be a problem, because you will have something too basic, and will limit you in the future of the site. A good CMS system like Joomla or Drupal, are great and are very complex, but you have to focus on the daily maintenance of the site and leave the complex process's to an expert, I am tired of seeing contents loss, and sites downs thanks to the maintenance people that think that after a few month of updating the content are ready to manage the hole system and for example set up a forum themselves, usually this is worst than a hacker attack.

Also you have to have in mind the volume of content you will have and the number of visits, as this affects the type of server you will need, you can start from server at 4 euros a month to 500 euros, the system will work exactly the same in both but it will freeze the cheap server taking your site down.

From my experience Joomla was the best CMS system for the publishing industry sector, is stable, easy to use and maintain, and it can expand nearly to any need, dough you will need a good developer to have it up an running correctly.

Ok friends I hope this lines where useful for some of you.
Cheers.
Pablo

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Permalink Reply by Pam Perry on February 12, 2009 at 12:36pm

Joomla! www.pamperrypr.com (and it's crazy...can't figure how to put stuff where!) But it's up and going...I need to know how to put our seminar's paypal buttons on there! Can you help?

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Permalink Reply by Michael Zingalis on February 12, 2009 at 4:17pm

The needs of online publishing has been well defined, and even productized. It isn’t a matter of sharing ‘one’ person’s self professed expertise vs. anothers. Nor is it about any ‘one’ vendor pontificating about CMS at large.

Instead it is driven by market trends, standards, and voice of customer….meaning ‘ALL’ publishing clients not one or two. In other words, with over 250 publishing client representing nearly 900 titles launched from a singular technology a ‘baseline’ in fact has been established. There are references to CMS, as if it is still a struggle to cobble together a working system to manage records, relative to their taxonomy (and related records from other silos). This is very late 1990s. Instead it is simply, which system leverages ‘ALL’ requirements within a single tool set in one fell swoop.

Paid Content/Member Personalization- Digital rights vs. subscriber rights
Taxonomy and Relationships (relating disparate items to one another through shared taxonomical labels)
Integrated SEO- how is this central silo of information handshaking with portals ‘daily’

Integrated Buyers Guide (directory publishing) how can listing sales be made online

Design tools- allowing integrated (non technologist) WYSWYIG tools to layout any form of ‘dynamic’ content

Integrated Email Broadcasting (down to serving personalized alerts where content types match user preferences)

There is such a technology, and apologize if I get exhausted reading threads that seem oblivious….as if each solution is a unique project in need of ‘hyper-customization’. They are all exactly the same, less the design and layout…which too can be managed sans development, using tools ‘of the content management system.’
Content is nothing more than a fancy word for ‘data’, which includes ‘everything’ (images, video, text, scripts). I have to chime in when I see it viewed as only a component of the solution (dependent on all sorts of expertise). Instead it can be the total solution….eliminating interpretation.

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Permalink Reply by CMS Critic - Mike Johnston on March 11, 2009 at 11:14am

There are a large number of content management systems listed here: http://cmscritic.com/cms-list

It's also a great location for reviews

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Permalink Reply by Alisa Cromer on July 2, 2009 at 2:59pm

Oleg,
I've been a fan of nSTein, which I ran into at NAA last April and posted in an online directory newmediahub.com, which is a source of news, strategy and suppliers to local media companies. We just started up about a month ago. Now I'm have to deal with the CMS issue myself. Since this is a very small vertical site (the universe is about 40,000 to 60,000 of which I have 1000 readers in the first month, and am targeting about 3000 to 4000 online media publisher, mostly local print, by the end of the year), I have to stay very small. Currently the site is on wordpress, and I am thinking either going to or adding an association-style cms like yourmembership.com which powers poynter.org, or adding Konnects.com which will have a business profile upsell in a bout 30 days, so the directory is integrated with community. It's a tough one for me. I'm going to look at some of the ones listed below.

Why don't you contact me at alisacromer@gmail.com.

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Permalink Reply by Tony Stasiek on October 22, 2009 at 1:47pm

Has anyone here used Ektron? We've been adapting the out-of-box version for what seems like 89 years, and I believe we're finally ready for execution. Are any people out there still building their sites with it, though?

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