Re-Thinking CMSs by Ben Brooks

Time for a Forward Thinking CMS via The Brooks Review.

That’s all well and fine, but isn’t it time someone built a CMS that actually works for users? I like WordPress a lot, that’s what I use here, but it’s about as user friendly as Windows, which is certainly better than MS-DOS, but falls a long way short of OS X.

I love the idea, and as someone who’s written a few CMSs in my time, have no idea how it’d be done.

Yet.

The biggest issue I’ve seen is that everyone want something just a tiny bit (or sometimes a lot) different. To accommodate this, at least the old way of dealing with it, is you either:

• Build something specific for the use case, small and tightly coded which does exactly what’s required (and end up with a fast and small system that needs to be rewritten or added to as soon as you or your client decide you want a bit more functionality), or
• Build something big and flexible, which will do whatever is needed through either options, plugins or extensions (and end up with a massive gargantuan bloated, but very flexible, mess), or
• Somewhere in between that compromises both the pros of the above.

That said if someone can give me the power of wordpress, the ease of use of squarespace, the ability to use dropbox as a store, and does a bunch of nifty things out of the box… I’m all over that.

Posted by Arcterex at February 07, 2013 05:00 PM