Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously,
“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”
- BALLAD IN PLAIN D

So, as you can see we’ve moved. About two weeks ago I decided to start this blog. A few hours and a few beers later, I was up and running on the hosted WordPress.com site. Picked the theme that I disliked least from the 17 or so available, and sprouted my first post. A couple of days later people that I didn’t even know started reading it, which was all very exciting.

It was about that time I realised that although WordPress.com is easy, it also sucks the big one if you want flexibility. The things that annoyed me in a week included:

• I have to pay to change the CSS. Probably a good things as my CSS is terrible and I’ll just make things worse, but I demand the right to change my CSS anyway.
• I have to pay to remove adverts. Fair enough I guess. In a moment of purity, I paid this for a year. Which was $30 down the toilet in retrospect.
• The built in analytics are horrible. I’m not actually sure what they mean. Of the 3,500 “Page Views” I’ve been told I’ve had since this has been live, I suspect 3,450 were from me, and the rest from me mum. Not even close to Google Analytics on the functionality front.
• The themes are inflexible. For example, I wanted to show only excerpts on my home page, not full stories. No-can-do with the theme I chose, I’m afraid. And the one line PHP change was beyond my control.
• I started to discover lots of cool plugins written by clever people, but I couldn’t touch them.

So yesterday we moved everything. I hope the migration has gone okay. I’ve chosen a theme I prefer. I’ve lost one comment, and it seems all the nesting of the existing comments. I’m going to see if I can h4x0r those back. I think all the existing deep links to the old jonontech.wordpress.com domain will actually still work. And the RSS feed is fixed with the auto-discovery feed matching the advertised feed. Thanks a million to James for helping me with this, seeing I couldn’t CSS or PHP my way out of a brown paper bag.

We had a few issues. My current hosting provider, it turns out, can’t support multiple host headers to my Linux VM, so that attempt failed. Then I tried my free GoDaddy hosting that came with my domain registration. Turns out that my account was incompatible with WordPress because “WordPress can only run on a paid hosting service”. Bastards! So I’ve coughed up my few dollars a month and, in the end, it was all remarkably easy. I also had to buy another WordPress.Com add-on so I could set up the deep link redirect to my new domain. Ching ching. That’s now $45 to WordPress. About a year’s hosting cost.

To be honest, I do think WordPress.com is pretty good. But, if you want flexibility and like WordPress, don’t be lazy like yours truly. Make the effort to host the thing yourself. Biggest blogging mistake I ever made.

Ye playboys and playgirls
Ain’t a-gonna run my world,
Not now or no other time
- PLAYBOYS AND PLAYGIRLS

Like many others, I use Twitter Search to listen to the word on the street in the areas about which I’m passionate. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of searches for “CMS“. In this case, however, the problem I have is that very few people are talking about the kind of CMS product in which I am interested. To illustrate this, have a look at the search for “CMS” using one of my favourite visualisers – the Twitter Stream Graph.

Twitter Visualiser for "CMS"

You probably can’t see the detail here (click the image to see the current stream), but it is clear that when most Twitter users say CMS, they mean WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!. There’s always a big PHP strand in there too.

So I panicked a bit. I know WordPress (from this blog, mainly). We very occasionally see Drupal in a vendor selection, and never see Joomla! at all. I’ve never been involved in an implementation with either. In fact, the technology team where I work is 45% .NET, 45% Java and 10% Misc. We tend to avoid PHP, Python, Perl and other scripting languages for various reasons which I won’t go in to here. So, are we really that out of touch?

I thought I’d dig around a bit more. I found the CMS Focus: CMS Report’s Top 30 Web Applications article and, of the 30, I’ve heard of about 60%. But we only implement 2 (SharePoint and Alfresco). That’s 7% of the top CMS products. Not very good.

So I tried the Open Jason 50 Content Management Systems list for a bit more choice. Of the 50, I’d only ever heard of about 10, most of which are blogging platforms (TypePad, MoveableType, Blogger and WordPress. Drupal and Joomla! are there. But this list is a year old, and the only new ones that have come onto my radar recently are Silverstripe (now available on the Microsoft Web Platform Installer) and GoodBarry. The rest have names like Moodle, Pligg, Triggit, Jogango and Weebly which just make me feel old . And we’ve never implemented any of these for a client, excluding simple blogs. So that is 0 / 50, or 0%. Things are going from bad to worse. Had a look at the 52 More Content Management Systems from the same source. Got a bit better there. Heard of maybe 20, and actually implemented three (Alfresco, eZ Publish and LifeRay).

I needed a more recent list, I think. Found 10 Promising Content Management Systems by Jacob Gube. Heard of 5, implemented 0. It’s getting desparate.

Fortunately, it seems, the clients that we work with don’t play in this space either. Just to reassure myself, I re-checked the list in my bible (that’s CMS Watch). Still good there. Of the 42 vendors covered, I’ve dealt with about 70% of them, and been on projects with about 50% of them.

Which brings me to my point. There are two worlds out there, in which the term CMS means something different. The Big Wide World, and My World.

To the Big Wide World (which includes Twitter, and all the sites I’ve mentioned above), CMS means “Free Open Source CMS with Low Cost of Ownership”. The commercial Open Source CMS solutions don’t make the cut either. Four of the five Open Source CMS products reviewed by CMS Watch (Drupal, Joomla!, Plone CMS and TYPO3) live in both worlds. Open CMS doesn’t as my feeling is it is a bit too complex. Alfresco, DotNetNuke and ez Publish made one of the lists above, but don’t really feature in the Tweetosphere.

I inhabit a world populated by analysts, commercial vendors, systems integrators, large agencies and other such creatures. I don’t believe we pay much attention to the other world until a product jumps the gap. And it seems difficult for a product that isn’t Java or Microsoft based to make it in to My World.

Looking at it from the other side, it seems difficult for a product that is Java or Microsoft to make it into the Big Wide World. There are very few good open source Microsoft (which I don’t find surprising) and Java (which I do) CMS systems. The open source community has embraced the scripting languages. If anyone has a simple, easy to use, Java based CMS that they really like, I’d love to hear from them.

In my head, the two worlds are still quite far apart. My “web generation” is extremely uncomfortable even calling WordPress a Content Management System. But the scary thing is that I suspect that I’m probably completely wrong on this. The two worlds might collide sooner than I think. Or maybe they have already and I just didn’t see it happen.

P.S. Here are two great posts that highlight various super cool Twitter visualisers:

• 6 Unique Twitter Visualizations by Ben Parr
• 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe by Nathan Yau (a year old but still cool)

P.P.S. The Open Source CMS Market Survey by Ric Shreves gives a really good overview of the Open Source CMS market. I wish I’d read that before I wrote this blog entry.