Nice roundup of lightweight content management systems and web page editors:
CMSs are beautiful things. Just as CSS allows us to abstract the design away from the markup, a CMS allows us to use a database to abstract the content away from the markup. There are a zillion of them, each with different backend UI’s and different ways to doing things.
But CMSs are for web people. Even my beloved WordPress can be challenging to train/explain to someone who has no experience working with websites. Perhaps this is the motivation toward a new trend in CMSs I’m calling “light” CMSs. Each of them attempt to make the task of updating content on a website easier and more intuitive. This is largely at the cost of features. These are for simple, otherwise static websites where updating content is the name of the game.
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Thanks for this post!
I am glad to hear other designers speak of how even WordPress is a little much for some clients to figure out.
Even though, I am still using it as the main platform for clients, I am now giving them the heads up that there’s a little bit they’ll have to learn, and it’s not going to be my job to do all of the teaching. That there are wonderful free videos out there, and tutorials, and if needed they can even hire a tutor for a few hours to help them.
Sometimes, a new client just surprises me with how frustrated they get, let’s say, uploading a file. So, I just have to keep learning how people are not like me. They can be intimidated by the computer, in ways I don’t even understand. Or, they can not be.
Anyway, I am excited to check these out, because I have been thinking about just this, of late.