As an online marketer, I used to work in different environments, but since joining Foliovision, I spend virtually all my time on our clients’ content management systems. Some days ago, I logged into a completely different CMS after a long time. It didn’t look bad at first glance, but spending just a few minutes working with this interface was enough to see the striking difference between this CMS and our own; this one was really medieval! I am a marketer, certainly not a hard-boiled developer, and for the first time, I’ve summarized my thoughts about what makes a good CMS. These are the pillars of success but also the risks involved.

I. Low initial costs

This means open source, choosing from the three respective candidates (here we explain why we chose Wordpress out of these three). There is a crowdsource counting dozens of millions of people who develop, test, rate, and upgrade several open source CMSs. You can’t beat this crowd with your team. Spending weeks developing your own or buying some obscure CMS from another company means you’ve wasted money form the beginning.

RISK: Some open source projects serve for years with the same or even increasing quality. Unfortunately, some start to slide backward as the time passes, and you have to leave the sinking ship at the right moment.

II. For all clients and purposes

Of course, you have to add “within the range of what CMS should provide.” There is nothing worse than getting your first BIG client and then realizing that the wooden legs of your CMS can’t accomodate your vision. Our example: we need to serve both a local Toronto realtor and a major Canadian insurance broker with different traffic, database requirements, and marketing strategies — not an easy task if you’re not prepared for it.

CMS websites are now the norm as the preferred content management and delivery solution. Nevertheless, many CMS web applications face scalability issues. However, when a CMS is put in the cloud, it theoretically resolves the scalability issue to obtain a complete benefit.

But, if a cloud platform is not configured to match the particular needs of the CMS, it will need to work harder. This will result in higher loads than what is actually needed to serve the incoming traffic. Therefore, in most cases, it is sensible to cache the static content. The issue that one faces here is whether the cloud is able to tell the difference between a user who has signed into an application and is therefore being served with dynamic content and the one who has not yet signed into the application.

At the same time, a CMS presents many other challenges other than scalability due to the paradigm shift from the traditional model of sharing files from a central repository.  The reason behind this is that websites no longer operate isolated or in standalone mode. They must be able to interact with a range of other business applications that range from ecommerce business solutions to CRM databases to a range of reporting as well as analytics tools. To cut a long story short, websites have become increasingly data and content hungry because of their complex nature and the requirements of their users.

Managing such websites is now a full-time job.  Earlier in the traditional hosting scenario, the site owner had to figure out how to look after the application, but also the servers, backups, databases, and others.  Now, the platforms are specialized, so handling a web application which was a full time job can now be addressed by a person who can pay full-time attention.

"Nesta, Wordpess and Drupal produce great blogs. However, we are making new-media newspapers, next-gen magazines, and hyperlocal, pulse-finding micro streams. We can’t save journalism without demanding more from our CMS."

-Erik Hinton, The Twilight of the CMS, TPM, July 11, 2011.

Any developer who has worked on building a CMS driven web site has experienced the complexities involved in a website deployment.

On the Ektron Blog Hub, Bill Cava makes the case that the ultimate success of a website isn't something that can be verified by a developer during development by asking, "how many developers are even aware of what the desired business outcomes for a website are -- let alone measure, verify, and optimize them during development, quality assurance, and usability testing?"

He makes the point that success largely depends on the quality of the developers working on the project and goes on to explain his "7 Tips to Being a Highly Successful Cms Developer"

Read the complete story, 7 Tips to Being a Highly Successful CMS Developer on the Ektron Blog Hub.