Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

CMS Light

July 2, 2009

Caught My Eye · Useability · User Experience

I just fin­ished read­ing Chris Coyier’s arti­cle, The “Light” CMS trend. For those of you who don’t know, CMS stands for “con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.” The con­tent is stored in a data­base and then served up on a page using a pre­de­fined tem­plate. The idea behind a CMS is to allow non-technical peo­ple the abil­ity to update, add or edit the con­tent on their Web site. It also allows mul­ti­ple authors and can also allow mul­ti­ple Web sites to share the same con­tent that will be updated in one place instead of on each indi­vid­ual site.

Chris points out the prob­lem with most CMSs is that they are really only use­ful to Web peo­ple, those who have expe­ri­ence with work­ing with Web sites. Word­Press is Chris’ favorite CMS and mine as well. But as I have done more devel­op­ment with Word­Press, I see that is does fall short in really empow­er­ing con­tent own­ers in the way that I would want.

A pos­si­ble solu­tion: “light” CMSs. There are a grow­ing num­ber of these solu­tions avail­able on the mar­ket today. Sev­eral of them are free ser­vices and at least one of them costs money. One of the rea­sons that I like Word­Press is that it is free, open source soft­ware that is con­tin­u­ally devel­oped. The price is right for the non-profit orga­ni­za­tion I work for.

These light CMS solu­tions con­tain less fea­tures which make them sim­pler, and I believe, a bet­ter user expe­ri­ence for the con­tent owner.

Here are the light CMS solu­tions that Chris high­lights in his arti­cle:

• Unify — Cur­rently in pri­vate beta. It is a prod­uct of Unit Inter­ac­tive which is headed up by Andy Rut­ledge, one of the design­ers I fol­low on Twit­ter and RSS. I was not able to take a close look at it.
• Cushy CMS — this seems to be the first player in the light CMS. It is a free service.
• Page Lime — in free pub­lic beta. It has a visual edi­tor and reminded me of Contribute.
• Perch — I really like their Web site and they have great doc­u­men­ta­tion. Perch costs about $57 per domain. You host it on your own server.

Anna Deben­ham reviewed Perch on this week’s Boag­world Pod­cast. She has also used Cushy CMS. She pointed out that the major advan­tage of using Perch over Cushy CMS is that the files are all hosted on your own server with Perch. She had prob­lems with the Cushy CMS server going down which meant the ser­vice was unavail­able. Page­Lime is also hosted on their servers.

Cushy CMS, Page­Lime, and Perch have videos intro­duc­tions about their ser­vice and good doc­u­men­ta­tion to get started. It seems pretty easy to imple­ment any of these three solu­tions. Cushy CMS and Page­Lime involve adding classes to your HTML code. Perch involved using spe­cific PHP tags and reminded me a lot of Word­Press.

From the lit­tle research I did this after­noon, I believe that Perch would be the prod­uct that I would choose. Yes, it costs money, but the big advan­tage is that you don’t have to worry about another server going down that you have no con­trol over. As I men­tioned, some of it’s fea­tures remind me of Word­Press. It would take more tech­ni­cal knowl­edge to setup Perch. It looks like their tem­plat­ing sys­tem is quite pow­er­ful and gives more con­trol to the Web designer or devel­oper. But the advan­tage it has over Word­Press is it’s sim­pler inter­face for the con­tent owner.

One final note: I really liked Perch’s site. It has nice tex­ture and illus­tra­tion. It uses JQuery for some fun ani­mated effects. The birds in the tree at the bot­tom ani­mate and move into the screen on pages where you can see the footer right away.