Articles > Choosing a Content Management System

Some CMS systems are better suited to smaller number of contributors, whilst others enable large numbers of editors to contribute content. Also, some vendors price their products and licence's according to the number of total and/or concurrent users. It is therefore useful to know how many employees would be adding content and whether this will increase over time.

If your content authors are situated locally or within a Local Area Network - then CMS products that require a 'client installation' (i.e. the software needs to be loaded on to every PC) can be easily installed, but if your content contributors are distributed geographically, or inputting from laptops and other mobile devices, or if your organisation consists of e.g. 500 plus PC's then a browser based CMS product may be more suitable to your needs.

Some CMS solutions focus very much on the lack of technical knowledge required to use their product. Their products will incorporate 'MS-Word-like' text editors and dumb down the graphical interface to the point where user training is not required. Other CMS vendors take the approach that their tool will still need to be used by someone with a degree of technical ability - but as a result it may offer more technical scope to the content contributor. Since it is the ability of your content contributors to productively add content that will determine the success of your project. The CMS has to be pitched at their level to ensure a smooth transition with minimum training requirement.

Approval processes and/or work flows are an issue that require close scrutiny. Most CMS's offer some kind of password protection to define who can change which pages or pieces of content. If you need to have further levels of authority such as a senior editor, then this will involve the integration of workflow into your CMS environment. There are varying degrees of workflow complexity - from the simple linear workflow - where work done simply passes from one person to the next until is is considered to be approved - to parallel workflow where content may require the concurrent approval of one or more users/groups before being released.
Workflow - and its necessity - can often increase the price of the CMS package - and it also requires careful documentation of existing and desired work flows within a website/intranet to ensure accurate replication of the intended approval process. If you are uncertain as to whether you will or won't need workflow - then it is probably advisable to choose a CMS that at least has the facility for including workflow at a later stage if not in the initial phases.

If you are intending to create an environment where e.g. a group of content editors all have the same rights, then your authority would reflect more of a 'role' based environment. If, on the other hand, you want to individually assign authority to different people to do different things, then this would reflect more of an individual based authority. Frequently, an organisation will need to be able to assign both individual AND role based authorities to reflect their publishing environments. You will need to know which type of structure you are aiming to replicate, as CMS's do vary in their approach to this issue. At one extreme, you will have fixed role types that are only able to change/add content at the page level. At the other end of the scale, you will have products that enable you to decide down to a type of content on a page e.g. text or images, which group and individual roles are applicable.

Is the content purely text ? or does it contain images, movies, sound files etc.? Some simpler content management systems only allow you to change text via an online form. If this is all you will ever want to do then you should be able to purchase a CMS at the lower end of the price scale. Equally, as you move up through the various CMS's on offer, you will find that the majority can cope with images and text, whilst others have difficulty integrating content such as e.g. 'Flash' movies.
Know your existing content and try to estimate what other types of content you would like to integrate - both today and in the future. One of the best ways to achieve this is to look at contemporary/competitor websites and see what they are using. Ensure that the CMS you choose has the ability to incorporate ALL the types of content you want to work with.

Do you want content editors to simply make changes to existing pages, or should they also be able to add new pages or even add new links to the navigation bar? Again, different CMS solutions will enable different degrees of content change.

Accepting that most CMS systems adhere to the separation of layout (sometimes referred to as the 'look and feel' of a site) and content, via the use of templates that are re-used every time a page is built, you will need to ask yourself whether the areas that are available for content editors to add content are unique pieces of content that will be used only once across a site - or do you wish to create a central pool of content e.g. images, text etc., that can be added once and used as many times as you like by a number of different editors. CMS's differ widely in this area. Some allow no re-use of content whilst others allow total re-use of content.

This is a very important question - and your answer will generally determine whether to select a fully dynamic CMS, or a 'baked file' CMS. It will also have a large impact on the licence costs that the CMS vendor applies, as dynamic systems are generally more expensive than their alternatives.
Dynamic content management systems i.e. ones that build web pages 'on the fly' (also referred to as 'upon request') are typically the only ones that can offer 'real-time' content changes, since they are always pulling the content and templates together using the most recently added changes. 'Baked file' CMS on the other hand focus upon allowing the content to be periodically updated on the live web site - so that content changes are said to be 'timely' rather than 'real-time'.
Your decision as to whether to go with a 'real-time' or 'timely' update, will depend largely upon the content you are managing. Since an applied workflow can often result in delays in any publishing process - it is arguable that a real-time system can only update what has been approved, so itself becomes also subject to a time delay before the live website is updated. Dynamic CMS's also require a greater degree of technical integration and as a result are more expensive to implement than those that publish in a 'timely' fashion.

Content version control effectively creates a new copy of a piece of content every time a change is made to it. The advantages of version control are the ability to rollback through previous versions and build up a trail of how e.g. a page has looked over time. This is not only useful for creating archives of information, but it provides a useful method of auditing who did what and when. On the down side, versions or any form of duplication, by its very definition requires storage space either on a database or in a file folder. Depending upon how often content changes, this could grow to be a significant size over time. If you think that your approval/workflow process is not enough of a safety net- and you would like the ability to roll back to previous content - then you will need to make sure that your CMS offers content version control.

In the modern web world it is not uncommon to want a page or piece of content to appear and/or disappear on certain date or at a certain time. The ability for an editor to be able to give a page or piece of content a valid time period, means that they do not have to manually add or remove the content at the times required. This not only improves the 'validity' of content and the 'stickiness' of the web experience, but it also allows a certain level of 'dynamism' to be included in the web experience. Some CMS vendors will combine the 'valid to/from' functionality with content version control, so that one version has a time date different from another version of the same content. The ability to time stamp content also enables a content contributor to produce content ahead of its intended publication and thus becomes another way to workflow the production of content.

Personalisation comes in many different forms and has become one of the most mis-used words in the content management arena. In its basic form, personalisation can be a case of simply showing a user a different page based on e.g. their 'user-login' or a 'cookie' that has been copied to the PC. At the other end of the scale, a fully dynamic system that is using 'business rules', can build a page based on logins, cookies, items previously viewed and even to the point where a visitors selections during a 'session' or site visit are used to intelligently decide what to show on a page.
Between these two extremes are varying degrees of so-called personalisation. There are varying claims about the negative performance impact of full personalisation and some vendors have developed patented methods that overcome some of these issues. It is fair to say though, that the more personalisation that you include in your content managed site, the more you will need to focus on the technical aspects of your web project to avoid a negative user experience. Equally, since all of the business rules that determines what a user is to be presented with as a personal experience have to be written, the more personalisation that is included, the more complex the development of the web project becomes.
Whilst there was initially a 'trumpet fanfare' that heralded the introduction of personalisation, mainly companies are now realising that it takes considerable effort and commitment to create and maintain, which can often outweigh the perceived benefits.

Often referred to by CMS vendors as 'dynamic linking', the ability for a CMS to automatically add/remove page links is one of those 'gems' that make a CMS worthwhile. Most of us have probably been to a website at least once where a 'click' on a link - results in an 'error page not found'. This is usually because at some point the page or article that corresponds to that link has been moved/deleted or even just simply renamed. Above a certain price threshold, most CMS's include the ability to 'validate' a websites internal and external links, so that if a page or piece of content is not found, the system will automatically remove all the links to it and change any navigation structures to reflect the actual content.
In this way, a visitor to the site is not even given the choice of clicking on the link as it does not physically exist. The only reason I can think of that you would not want this functionality is price - as it does tend to be a feature of mid-range CMS's at the moment.

Most CMS solutions will separate the layout ('look and feel') from the actual content using a series of layout templates that are used every time a page is created. The main benefit to this type of page creation is that it becomes very easy to re-design/alter e.g. one template, changing the look and feel of it, that may have an immediate impact on several thousand pages.
Since most web projects will contain at least some amount of standardised look and feel - if only the navigation - the question becomes more of a case of how easy it is to create and change your branded 'look and feel'. If you envisage that your templates will change on a regular basis, you will need to make sure that the CMS allows you to change them quickly, easily and using a programming language that you have available in house. For example, if currently you only have people in house with expertise in frontpage/html, then it would make more sense to use a CMS that creates templates using html than e.g. ASP or JSP.

Increasingly CMS's are taking on the 'globalisation' issue to the extent that many now offer you the ability to integrate different languages. There are essentially two questions you need to ask yourself, one linked to the other.

1. Do I need to have a version of my site available in one or more languages?
2. If I do need different languages - are they western alphabet such as German or French - or are they non-western languages like Arabic or Japanese?

As with a lot of CMS functionality - if you don't need other languages, then you will probably be able to consider a lower cost solution. If you do want to have your site represented in different languages, you will need to know which ones. At present, CMS's that cater for multi languages will most probably allow you to integrate any of the western alphabet languages for both the templates that make up the 'look and feel' of your site and the content that is added by your content contributors.
The leap that is currently being made is the integration of non-western alphabet languages such as Japanese. Most of the major players are either projecting a date when non-western languages will be available, or have it on their product plan for introduction in the near future. If it is an issue for you right now, then you will need to make sure that you can not only 'cut and paste' e.g. Japanese into a content area or template, but that it is possible to preview it as Japanese and that any text editor will allow the same text to be edited from within the CMS in Japanese. It is also worth checking that you can use the CMS functionality such as internal searches using the chosen non western alphabet.

Commonly referred to as 'tri-media' - if you want to be able to publish the same content across not just the Internet, but also e.g. mobile phones, then you will need to select a CMS that allows this. You may also hear the term 'template version control in conjunction with the ability to cater for tri-media, as this is most commonly the way that is used to take the same content as e.g. appears on a website and re-use it with a template that has a 'look and feel' (different source code) that makes it more appropriate for e.g. showing on a mobile phone or Digital TV.
The idea is simple - write once and re-use many times. Even if it is not a consideration for your website at the moment - in a 'future proof' sense - it is not a bad idea to choose a CMS that at least has the ability to cater for the expansion of your visitor base. As e.g. Digital TV becomes more popular, it is a relatively simple step to expand your content managed site quickly and inexpensively, IF it has been developed with tri-media in mind. If your CMS does not offer this facility, then you are faced with changing your CMS, using another software package in addition to the CMS, or accepting the competitive disadvantage imposed upon you by your chosen product.
IT Infrastructure requirements
· What skills do you have in-house to manage the site? and what technical skills does the CMS require?
If in-house skills are short, will it be easy to make up the shortfall using outside consultants? are they readily available? and at what cost?