Your CMS needs to evolve
There are literally thousands of content management systems out there. Many of them open sourced or free to use, some of them as hosted services, some of them as classic shareware. And still many of us have an urgent need to WRITE OUR OWN CMS to fit our needs.
In 21. century, when there’s an library for almost everything. When everyone is using some framework. When everyone tends to do different things then reinvent the wheel. Isn’t it kinda stupid? I think so. But…
CMS as we know them are systems of the past. They look and work the same way today as they did in 2000. They didn’t respond to the Web 2.0 (or we may call it a “social networks era”). They didn’t catch the change of the web design industry. There were times when one man could be an expert in every part of web design process. When web sites looked mostly the same (header, navigation column, content and footer). Today we need a whole team to create really great sites. And today’s web sites? They definitely don’t look the same.
Today we tend to play with every word on the web site. And a typical page has a number of important areas, not only one “content” area. For instance your product advertisement, quick info about your clients, embedded Twitter and so on. And not even after a day of searching on Google for some CMS even remotely capable of handling these things, I ended up with empty hands. So the only option remains - to write your own CMS (or something similar) to address your needs.
And there comes the Question (oh yeah, big one). If you worked hard on the text, if you paid a lot of attention to every pixel, how much power should you give your CMS user? Should he be able to edit texts on the site? Or only few defined areas? Should he be able to add images where he wants? And isn’t it better to just ask him to send you an email when he’ll want to make changes? Maybe his site would in the end work much better.
And when building CMS just for yourself, should even you have such a power? Isn’t it better to do the process of changing something on live site a bit difficult to make you think before doing changes? (We all know what happens when you send an email when tired, right?)
Is it worth the costs to build an CMS? And if to build one - what should it be capable to do? In my opinion we need something like CMS but I think that what we’ll use in the future will have completely different approach to content, will support social networks etc. Unfortunately I don’t know how it will work or look like. I believe they will be be paid services and they’ll be hosted by some companies, not the creator of the web site. But the rest remains hidden. What do you think?
PS: Note that I’m not talking about CMSs for blogging, it’s completely different situation and I think that current CMSs handles this pretty well.
