“We live in a time where people have an amazing amount of power when it comes to publishing. Blogging, podcasts, vidcasts (or whatever you call ‘em) and more have been put into the hands of millions and it’s changing the way we live and work. Despite all of that, content management for the web remains a huge pain point for many individuals and businesses. The amount of time, effort and money that’s involved (and often wasted) to do things that are seemingly rather straightforward is astronomical. I mean, how hard does it have to be?”

“Shopify is an application that we host which allows you to setup an online store to sell your goods. You can accept credit card payments, track and respond to orders — all the perks of a physical store without the hassle.”

“With a book half-written, two conferences looming, and waves of client work smashing the levees, it seemed a good time to change hosts and funnel this old hand-tooled site into a modern content management system. The site is now powered by WordPress and hosted by Media Temple. The hand-rolled summaries feed has retired.”

“Though definitely not as sexy to talk about as tagging, and mashups, and whom Yahoo acquired today, I think that the trends we’re witnessing in enterprise software will have a far greater impact than much of what’s being discussed. And the most obvious trend is that the enterprise software market is being eaten away from below. My favorite case in point is Movable Type, the software which enables me to publish this blog. With a few modifications, it enabled Adaptive Path to publish it’s site. And then, as this post makes clear, with a fair bit of modification, it powers the site for SEED Magazine. What this demonstrates is what we’ve known all along — Movable Type isn’t a blog publishing tool — it’s a lightweight content management system. Blog publishing was essentially a trojan horse toward rethinking how to enable publishing on the Web. In my world, content management systems (CMSes) have long been the enterprise software that has been the biggest pain in the ass to deal with.”

“James Melzer has developed an impressive roadmap (268Kb PDF) for Enterprise Content Management in Context. After your initial review you may be overwhelmed, as I was, but don’t worry: take a deeper look and you’ll find it quite useful.”

“Open source content management software sucks. It sucks really badly. The only things worse is every commercial CMS I’ve used. But it really doesn’t have to be that way. I did some research recently at OpenSourceCMS.com — a fantastic site that lets you play with dozens of CMS installations — and left pretty depressed. What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience.”

“We believe that content management is essential to organizations of every type. It harvests and promotes both financial and human value for the companies and organizations that can tap its potential. CM Pros is a membership organization that fosters the sharing of content management information, practices, and strategies. We seek to improve content management practices within all organizations…”

“Please join Adaptive Path’s own Jeffrey Veen, along with Jason Fried of 37signals and Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners, this May in Chicago. Over the last few years, Adaptive Path has spent a lot of time with clients figuring out why so many CMS projects fail. Jeffrey’s workshop will teach you the steps we recommend for any sort of CMS project, including assessing your needs, building a team, and, of course, lots of best practices. Let the lessons we’ve learned guide you in how to design and implement the solution that’s right for you. And as a special bonus ó the very next day you can join Jason Fried of Chicago design firm 37signals and Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners for their one-day workshop Blogging for Business.” There’s a deep discount to those who’d like to attend both workshops: Use the ‘Friends of Adaptive Path’ promo code FOAP to knock 15% off the registration fee!

“Where’s the disconnect between what’s possible and the too-often failure of CMS? Content management systems suck. Or so you would think from the strife heard from analystsand practitioners alike. And yet, many websites regularly publish vast amounts of information with superior control and ease compared to manually editing pages. So where’s the disconnect between what’s possible and the too-often failure of CMS?”

“WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability… WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog, as b2 development has stopped. We hope by focusing on web standards and user experience we can create a tool different from anything else out there.” FYI: We moved bBlog and xBlog over to Wordpress last month and have been very happy with the system!

A new weblog and discussion forum focusing on Content Management Systems. “After looking around the web for a good discussion board on content management, I decided to just start one myself. Apart from the great cms-list email list there’s not much discussion around.”

“This book is about designing and coding Content Management Systems from scratch. It covers revisioning, permissions, workflow, and templates, and by the time you’ve reached the end, you should be able to write your own enterprise-strength CMS from the ground up, or at least have a better appreciation of the issues involved.”

“Many people are looking for content Management system. A lot of major products are already known, but a few of them are incomplete and quite unknown and could help other developers by the ideas or the piece of codes they have to offer. I will try to track them.”

“A content management system must manage the relationships of the information objects it contains. There are two ways to relate information objects: linking and naming. Linking creates a specific connection between two (or more) specific information objects. Naming clarifies the names of things referred to in one information object in such a way that it is possible at a later time to create a link to many different objects.”

“Paul Browning and Mike Lowndes gave an excellent expose of elements that might be found in a Content Management System, covering 41 features and listing over 80 products. There appeared to be a blurring between Virtual Learning Environments, Document Management Systems, Web-enabled databases, Web application servers and desktop Web publishing tools — all of which can lay claim to some elements of a CMS.” From the 4th Institutional Web Management Workshop, University of Bath, 6-8 September 2000.