I’ve worked in a variety of content management solutions, and I helped develop, debug, and test the one in use at Digital Partners (aka ispi). Content management solutions like MovableType are great chunks of software, well written for your basic content manager, but there is one thing they don’t have, and that’s a good understanding of the editorial process.
Amy Gahran has written a great piece (as well as a follow up article) about what she wishes content management vendors and Web site/intranet owners would understand about the editorial process so they can adapt their tools accordingly. A good read, especially if this type of thing is of interest to you.
Comments
Very interesting articles, Jake. Could be subtitled “when two worlds collide” – the artistic, muse-inspired, aggravatingly contentious world of creating content, and those who think it can be reduced to 1s and 0s and bits and bytes.
Meeting in the middle is fine, as long as it’s a hill, not a chasm;-)
Sadly, though, there’s FAR too many systems that take the chasm approach that are built by programmers, for programmers, and that’s fine, if you’re a programmer. The problem is that the people who would use a CMS need it because they’re not a programmer. We had a good crew of designers that helped make the front and back end of the ispi software really friendly, and a couple folks on staff (including me) that knew more about the editorial process that made it easier for newsrooms.