“RE: Ugly Secrets of Content Management Systems”

> This is the way I would like CMS to work, each would be a semi
> custom solution built from standard components.  Yes, no one
> builds a wheel from scratch (unless for cycling :)  anymore,
> but people do like to be able to replace their current wheels
> with differnt wheels from other manufactures when they need to
> or want to.

I entirely agree with what you are saying and to a large extent you are defending instead of defeating my point. However, what Mr. Guterman is suggesting in his article is that everyone builds that wheel from scratch instead of buying a ready-made wheel if at all possible. Yes, perhaps what the company needs isn't available and must be made from scratch. And that is a perfectly acceptable solution to the problem if custom work is the only option available. However, it is folly to insist that every company that wishes a CMS should build it's own CMS from the bare ground up.

There are CMS systems out there that allow customization to varying degrees. In a perfect solution this flexibility would be infinite allowing for every customer to make the off the shelf system work to his exact specification. Whether those components are company brewed or third party is almost irrelevant. Returning to your analogy, where the wheel comes from is almost an insignificant detail if all you are doing is replacing that one wheel not designing and building the entire car from scratch.

Building any software system from nothing is an expensive and time consuming task best left to someone who has the interest and self motivation to risk their resources on the venture. A CMS is a large application, starting from just the UNIX file system and some other tool to a working CMS is not as trivial as Mr. Guterman would have us all believe. If developing a good CMS were so trivial then the big guys he is complaining about would have solved the problem to everyone's pleasure instead of everyone's irritation. Again, Mr. Guterman is not suggesting take a CMS and modify it to your needs but instead he is advocating take a file system or database and build a CMS from there. The storage of the data is the most trivial aspect of a good CMS. How to get that data to a published page is the hard part. Mr. Guterman fails to mention the enormous cost and risk involved in developing that one "little" hard part.

I too wish that it were possible to buy a base system and just add the pieces, as you need them. In point of fact no CMS available currently can do what we are wishing for. However, there is a CMS that brings us closer to that dream than any other system currently available but even that CMS doesn't take us all the way to our dream. Perhaps for no other reason than a cadre of third parties building all the different parts we'd need is not currently available. Returning to Mr. Guterman's article, he isn't advising such a course as we are dreaming of.

A CMS does more than just organize the pages, like a file system does, and determining how they are rendered, as JSP does. A good CMS allows the building, management, editing, editorializing, and organization of those pages. One tightly integrated solution to this problem is infinitely better for the body corporate than a spattering of applications and technologies. And that is where we return to which course do we take to achieve that tightly integrated system? Mr. Guterman believes that there is no system available that would allow any corporate site to fully realize it's vision for what a CMS should do. So building the system from scratch, is Mr. Guterman's suggestion. I propose that buying the system off the shelf and customizing to your needs is the less risky and most cost effective choice for any company except the massive corporation with a large IT resource.

Where perhaps I would agree with Mr. Guterman is that the large CMS's he mentions in his article fail to deliver on their promises. However, that is not the fault of all CMS's but of those CMS's. I strongly believe that there are CMS's currently available that would appease the needs of many companies.