Jon On Tech

We’ve all read plenty of CMS Evaluation RFP response documents. And we’ve all sat through many a long CMS Vendor demo. Maybe it’s just me, but they’re all starting to look pretty similar. So, how do you differentiate between these things?

Last week, LBi hosted the Umbraco 2009 UK meetup. This was mainly due to the enthuasism of the organiser, Darren Ferguson, and the power of Twitter. Niels, the founder, joined us from Norway.

Web Content Management has progressed from a Gartner MarketScope in 2008 to a Magic Quadrant in 2009. I’m normally quite a fan of Gartner, and was fortunate enough to hear Mick MacComascaigh (the lead WCM Analyst) give a great presentation at a recent event. We even had a nice chat about WCM Maturity Models afterward. However, I’ve got to say that it’s quite difficult not to treat this research as a giant advert for Oracle.

Fifteens years ago, two great Americans, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, created something. Ross Garber and Neil Webber’s product came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Content Management editors who had been seared in the flames of unmanageable sites. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their tedious static HTML updates. But fifteens years later, the CMS world is still imperfect. Fifteen years later, thousands of vendors are still sadly crippled by a lack of standard patterns, terminology, tools and concerns. Fifteen years later, CMS vendors still live on a lonely islands of in the midst of a vast ocean of potential standards. Fifteen years later, there still isn’t anyone who has done it properly. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

If you are into Content Management, here is a list of people you should follow on Twitter. And an easy way to follow them all in a few clicks.

As promised, here are the completely meaningless results from the “Which Content Management System are you?” quiz.

An interesting play by FatWire. Our knights in shining armour have heard the shrill cries of distress from the damsels stuck at the top of Tower Vignette and Tower Interwoven and have gallantly offered to migrate them away to the safety of Castle FatWire for free. The name of the package (FatWire Rescue Program) implies the damsels are in serious trouble. Maybe this is a marketing stunt, maybe it is a genuine way for customers to save time and money.

Just read the Econsultancy CMS Survey Report 2009. It is an good survey, and the results make interesting reading. There were over 800 respondents, with just over half representing customers, with most of others being CMS Vendors or implementers. The customers and vendors only really had different opinions on three questions. And I have some interesting observations. At least, interesting to me.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit these days, normally in the middle of the night. I’ve been burned a couple of times recently by extremely unpleasant content migrations, and extremely unpleasant nappy changes. Here are ten similarities. For those on the other side of the pond, a nappy is a diaper.

More like this please. As much as I enjoyed the CMS Vendor Meme, I have to admit that the results are fairly meaningless. Most of the answers were extremely corporate and towed the party line. So I was overjoyed to see Adrian Mateljan post his view on the Open Text response to the meme. I hope other developers will follow his lead.