a team blog post to answer the ThinkVitamin article about content management

I have been doing some thinking... I am not sure a reply through a comment is the way to go on this one, or maybe a short one. I have never used the team blog yet (though Zi created an account for me), but here is the perfect occasion. I have lots of ideas about what D. Keith Robinson has written.

Too much to fit a blog comment. I think I could write a pretty decent article : first ideas and reactions to the author’s ideas, then how MODx really fits some of his wishes about content management. Since we don’t have trackbacks, I’ll point to the blog post if comment are still open by then (or write the author).

What do you think ?

Quote from: davidm at Oct 12, 2006, 03:51 PM

Sure, but in between, there is room for smart combination of both point of view... which I think we do here.

Of course, the pitch we have on the front page uses some buzz words, but it’s not to be taken to the first degree (the 100% buzzoword compliant, never took it a front value...).

Yes, a sense of humor helps

I’d even go as far as saying it’s a survival skill in a sometimes harsh world... and certainly helps make life easier at all times

Go for it!

Sounds like a great idea David, I will be looking forward to your post.

I like the 100% buzzword compliant line, but the rest of the sentence doesn’t make sense and that guy’s right to query it:
"MODx [...] makes child’s play of building content managed sites with validating, accessible CSS layouts – hence Ajax CMS".
No part of the features mentioned have anything to do with Ajax. So the "hence Ajax" is a non-sequitur, which has some amusement value but crosses the line into "inaccurate" rather than just playful. If we could just ditch the words " - hence Ajax CMS" and finish that sentence at "layouts" I think the whole page would be stronger. Ajax CMS still makes sense as a heading.

As for the article.. well it’s difficult to really disagree with it, but it’s easy to dislike it. Generally I found it meandering. It takes a long time to basically say "A CMS does not generate and manage content all by itself and needs to fit into your workflow". Which is pretty much like saying you can’t expect a magazine to get published every month just because you have installed Quark, you also need a team of people who can cobble a magazine together.

And there’s definitely an inference that CMSes cost more money than writing your own custom app. Also he keeps knocking down his own arguments. In fact, the more I think about the article, the less I like it.

Sure, a team of skilled people is good. But this is weavers vs the industrial revolution. We want to spend time adding content rather than managing a team of people. We want to... do more with less. My workplace is down 2 members of staff, but because we’ve started using MODx we’ve not really noticed.

I’d really like to see a response piece from David, but it sounds like two articles:
1: A personal reflection on the ideas
2: How MODx solves the "problems"
I think the second one deserves more prominence than the first.

Also worth looking at D Keith’s personal entry on the subject:
http://www.dkeithrobinson.com/entry/your_thoughts_on_content_management

Thanks a lot Paul for your input !
About the two different parts, that’s exactly what I had in mind

I missed the Keith personnal entry about this, thanks very much for the pointer ! It will be most definitely helpful.

About rewriting the front page, well why not ? It’s more than one year old anyway (I jumped in in november 2005 and I don’t recall it being different). Things have moved and we’ve gained some experience and feedback about the project.

I’d especially like to put in a few key testimonies, with a link to a testimony page (I’ve gathered a good bunch of them over time, enough to do a full page). A link to the video would be nice too.

I have started writing the article, but as you say I first have to sort out Keith Robinson’s post, which meandering alright. I wouldn’t want to do that. What I am aiming for is impact, which mean write short and to the point. Also, I have to be fast, if I publish something too late, I will loose momentuum.

I’ll try to post a draft later tonight...

And I read
http://www2.jeffcroft.com/2006/sep/20/personal-content-management/

Here is another idea of blog post ! The recipe example Jeff Croft takes to demonstrate current limitations of content management systems could make a nice step by step case for MODx

Food for thoughts...

Here is a first draft of the intro, which will give you a rough idea of where I am going with this (please bear with the typos and probably language errors in there, it’s a first batch ! I’ll add links and formatting later...).

I came accross an ambitious article from D. Keith Robinson « Redefining content management ». Quite an interresting read, and food for thoughts : focus less on technology and don’t forget, people, process and content. That’s certainly something I can relate to, as a former business process and total quality consultant. Focus more on content and management and less on systems, it’s also something I am very interrested in keeping in mind as a freelance webdesigner and MODx team member.

It’s very easy to loose perspective when you’re working on the technical side of things. Building websites for clients, taking part in improving content management tools, it’s only natural to focus on short term goals and loose track of the guiding principles. Yet, I’d be more optimistic about the state of things, as far as content management systems are concerned.

I agree with Keith Robinson that « content management for the web remains a huge pain point for many individuals and businesses ». Clients and users are tired of expensive and complicated tools. But it’s not the whole story. Blaming CMS for bad content management practice is, in my opinion, barking at the wrong tree... and forgetting CMS are built by people too !

Of course, there are still lots of « old school » professionnals selling « out-the-box » , « do-it-all » systems which they charge fortunes and finally end-up rarely if ever used. But a growing proportion of people working in the web industry are just as frustrated with most existing content management solutions as users and clients are.

Designers are tired of hacking their way into building engaging, standards compliant, accessible websites because of rigid templating systems and bad separation between content and presentation. Developpers are tired of hacking into CMS’s core to have their addons work the way they want it because of the core’s design limitations.

I do believe the days of « out-of-the-box » solutions is progressively coming to an end, opening the doors to highly flexible, customized yet fast-to-deploy web applications. I happen to believe that MODx is part, and better yet among those heading the pack of that « new wave » of sorts. It doesn’t matter if it’s web 2.0, or some other buzzword. What matters is, some developpers are aware of the limitations of existing solutions and trying to redefine content management systems.

Let me first react in more details to some of the key ideas D. Keith Robinson has exposed in his article, and then explain why I think the MODx project is contributing to redefine the way we work with content management systems.

In my earlier point about two articles, I meant two separate articles, not one article that covers one thing then another.
Even so, the draft intro is looking good.

"Ambitious" is always a good way of commending effort and intention when the final result is lacking.

I typed the following (including the sample intro) before reading David’s intro draft.

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Jeff Croft post is interesting too. Actually, responding to multiple articles in one MODx blog post is probably a good idea, and helps to accounts for the time gap. (Also, one source is plagiarism, two sources is research.) Picking the common complaints (including some of the points made in the comments) would help avoid it seeming like a comment to one thread. As a web developer who will be making money out of using MODx to solve clients’ website management requirements, I think the points about tailoring to suit client needs are very good, and I want to avoid saying "MODx is free and works out of the box".

Something like: (and I’ve ended up fleshing this out more than I expected to...)

We’ve noticed a number of major articles about content management in recent weeks. Jeff Croft has written about the importance of structure and context for content. Keith Wotsit has written for Vitamin about the need to focus on people. These have provided the team with interesting perspectives on content management. As we have spent time with MODx and have made it the core of all our web projects, we’ve almost forgotten that there are people out there struggling with simplistic rigid CMSes, people out there who are so disillusioned with the CMSes they have tried that they are writing custom code to do even the most basic things, and people who are paying megabucks for unsuitable off-the-shelf systems rather than investing modest amounts of time in the tailoring of a flexible system to suit their particular working practices and needs. And we’ve been working so hard on the next release of MODx that we’ve forgotten how much the existing 6-month old release is better than many of the apps that are out there claiming to be a content management system.

Jeff’s closing comments are instructive:

But most of all: when looking for a CMS, look for one that provides you a platform to do whatever you want. Don’t look for one that anticipates what you want and then makes you do it. Your CMS should be a platform upon which you can easily build and manage structured data of any type. You should never have to wedge a photo gallery into a blog entry form — you should be able to simply create a photo gallery object and associate with a particular blog entry. If your CMS can’t do this — or doesn’t at least provide enough of an extensible platform that you could add this kind of functionality with relative ease — then your CMS isn’t really managing your content at all. Instead, it’s getting in the way of you managing it.

MODx *is* such a platform.

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Now, having read David’s piece, I know that a number of us have ideas about content management and what is important in a system that naturally spring from these articles. I think it may be time to get all the MODx team to each post a short piece about content management and CMSes from their perspective. For example, I’m sure Jason could respond to

Many people are starting to get the idea that structured data, context, and semantics are the key elements of the most interesting, interactive, and fun sites on the web today. However, many of the tools we have for managing content don’t facilitate this sort of site at all. Content management, especially on the personal/blogging level, needs to grow up.

with something about his vision for the core (being sure to stress that the existing MODx code is pretty good too).

So imagine my sample text above with the following final line:

All this week, in the run up to the official release of MODx 0.9.5, the MODx team will be sharing their ideas of content management and helping to show how MODx - the system, the framework - is the right platform for content management.

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Can we all say "THEME WEEK" ??