Swanson Russell

Content is king. No matter how impressive the visuals or other aspects of the site are, nobody can find your site without good content promoting it. Nobody will stick around for longer than a picosecond without good content grabbing their attention and keeping them interested. Perhaps most important of all, though, nobody is going to come back for a repeat visit if the content they are exposed to initially isn't engaging and useful.

But this article isn't about writing the content – that's already been covered by people much more qualified than myself. Rather, today's topic is focused on how we add new content and keep the existing material up-to-date. For that, you need a system to manage your content, known in the industry as a Content Management System (CMS), and more importantly you need people to follow and use that system.

So what exactly is a Content Management System?

In order to define what a CMS actually is, we need to define what it does. There are a few universal functions that a CMS fulfills regardless of the details.

1) Content organization and navigation structure.

2) User interface to add, edit and manage content.

3) A framework on which developers can build new websites and/or features.

All modern CMS software provides the first two features, and most systems also perform the third function in one fashion or another. Even the old school "webmaster" who maintained raw HTML code by hand has a rudimentary system in place, albeit not very user-friendly or efficient. What really differentiates the best Content Management Systems from the rest of the crowd is how well these concepts are implemented, specifically in terms of user experience, flexibility and consistency.

Alright, so, which CMS is the best for my organization?

There are literally hundreds of web-based CMS solutions for each of the various platforms and web servers, programming languages, databases and many other technical requirements. All of them eventually boil down to a few high-level categories:

1) Enterprise – Attempts to provide nearly every possible feature or option conceivable out of the box, often at an increased up-front cost. Developers sacrifice flexibility and options for a unified and polished user experience. Common among "enterprise" solutions.

2) Modular – Focused on flexibility and customization for individual projects, each feature can be mixed and matched with others to create the "perfect" system. Reduced up-front and ongoing maintenance costs are often balanced against additional customization that isn't possible with other systems. Common among popular open-source projects and solutions.

3) Single Platform – They do one thing and do it really, really well, but aren't easily adapted or extended beyond their primary niche(s). Common with both proprietary, niche-based products and open-source solutions alike.

4) Manual – No actual system, just a developer or two managing static files as demand requires. Every feature has to be built from scratch at significant cost, which limits scalability, but there's no extra cost or work for unnecessary or undesired features.

Over the years, we've realized that there isn’t a single set of functionality, technology and interface that works for every single project. We might be able to fit 90% of our projects into a single set of shared functionality, but eventually there will come a project that doesn't fit nicely into the standard mold, and once that happens, the all-for-one solution no longer fits. For these reasons we tend to prefer the modular approach, which allows us to have a common set of functionality that can be implemented as needed, but still allows for nearly unlimited flexibility and customization for each project.

Enough is enough. What CMS does Swanson Russell prefer?

We work primarily with the Drupal open-source project as the framework for each website project. Drupal is an open-source solution developed in PHP and deployed primarily in a Linux/Apache environment, which means there are zero setup and/or licensing costs. As an open-source project, we can take advantage of common functionality developed and maintained by the thousands of Drupal developers throughout the industry and across the world, as well as give back to the community when we make our own additions and improvements. And all of this can be combined with a powerful and flexible system that allows us to extend, customize and improve nearly any facet of the overall system.

That 90% of shared functionality can still be easily shared across projects when it makes sense, or we can build something entirely unique for a specific website. Our developers are able to become experts in a standard framework, which speeds up the implementation of new features, but we're still able to rely on the wider open-source community to avoid constantly re-building the metaphorical wheel. And on the content side, we can take advantage of flexible yet consistent concepts and structures when planning and designing each project.

While there might be common concepts and interface elements from project to project, due to its modularity we're essentially building a unique Content Management System tailored to the content, navigation and users for each individual project. The end result is a system that does only what you need it to, does it well, and allows you to spend time focusing on what matters: the content!