I’ve been doing a fair amount of work with a ‘CMS’ recently. I struggle to call it a CMS, because it’s actually more than that, it’s also a full development platform, the idea being, that people should be able to create sites in it, and update them without a huge amount of technicial ability.

The problem is, it seems to me, that it’d be as quick to learn HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL and build you’re own, as it would to learn the systems quirks and how to actually develop in it.

So maybe it’s actually meant for developers to develop in, and then hand over to editorial people to add content?

Nah, from a development point of view, it’s appaling, even when it’s running at a proper speed, it’s not a nice system to develop in. It has lots of quirks and restriction on how things can be done. There’s little you can really do in the way of dynamics without resorting to JavaScript, you edit it all within a browser window, that means no find, or search and replace, no colour formatting, no ability to tab code.
I’ve also spent most of the morning making the same changes to about 8 ‘assets’ (not files, each asset is built using half a dozen components, and yeah, rather than editing one file, I’ve had to go into at least 4 of those components to make changes), to me, that’s the wrong way round. The whole idea of database backend sites is that you make 1, or very few changes, which are picked up in other places. Not in this case it seems….

We also seem unable to work on a test setup. Changes we make are live on the sites, only caching provides us a buffer between change making and people seeing it live.

So as I’ve been making some fairly large changes to a main area index page on a site, the changes are appearing live, before I’ve finished them, making it seem broken. Which is taking all the much more time because I have to make the same changes in several places and navigate the awkward structure of the way it all links together.
I can’t work on an offline version, as I do with sites not on this system, and then replicate them to the live platform, no, I have to try and work quickly and get as many of the adjustments done as quickly as possible, so that when the cache expires, it doesn’t look too bad.

Great system huh?

So it seems it’s a system that doesn’t really know what it is. It’s a CMS to allow non-technical people to add and remove content from a site, fair enough. In that respect, it’s probably not TOO bad (though far from easy, and aside from a few bits of functionality like scheduled updates, it’s not as easy to use as many blog platforms).

But it completely loses it’s way in the development side of things.

I know, that using a platform like Wordpress or Drupal (the 2 I have most experience with), that I can go in and edit tempaltes relatively easily. I need to learn the keywords they both use to insert auto generated content, but they are pretty easy to edit, they have files I can edit in whatever editor I choose, I can run test sites easily enough from within something like <a xhref=”http://www.wampserver.com/en/” mce_href=”http://www.wampserver.com/en/”>WAMP</a>, or have a proper linux machine set up as a test server which I can work on offline, and then transfer to the live platform with absolutely minimal interuption to the live site.

Argueably they are more flexible in terms of development.

I wonder if they have quite the amount of felxibility desired by the people I work for these days. We do a lot of selling of ad space on web sites, a lot of banners and skyscrapers, but often they need to be targetted at specific area’s of a site, so one company might pay for a banner against a reviews section only for example. I don’t know quite how easy that would be to impliment in standard Drupal/Wordpress type setups.

But oh I would so much prefer to get round that problem than work with this no-mans land of a system in current use.

I altered the CSS file for a very large and popular site yesterday, because of the complex way the system builds it’s pages internally, that CSS is still not being displayed to the outside world, and I’ve now made the HTML changes, so the page doesn’t look very good right now…

*sigh*
Please, let me use Textpad and WAMP and I’ll build a site faster from scratch….. Just don’t expect the WYSIWYG editor interface….</rant>

This entry was posted on Friday, May 5th, 2006 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.