Web Content Management

Chapter 2. Points of Comparison

In medicine, certain conditions are known as “spectrum disorders” because they’re not simple binary conditions from which you suffer or don’t suffer. Rather, these conditions exist along a spectrum of severity. One can suffer from a condition slightly or severely, and the difference might manifest as entirely different symptoms and require entirely different treatments.

Web content management can be the same way.

To demonstrate this, it might help to examine the aspects of content management as a series of comparisons or dichotomies. By understanding the range of available options along a particular axis and what the boundaries are on either side, we can begin to understand the full breadth of options.

There are numerous facets to systems, implementations, and practices that are simply not black and white. In fact, there are few absolutes in content management. What’s correct in one situation is clearly wrong in another. What’s right for one organization would be a disaster at another. The key to making a CMS work is making the right decisions for your situation, which often makes it seem like more art than science.

Furthermore, the fundamental differences we’re going to explore here make it difficult to compare CMSs accurately. Instead of apples to apples, you end up with apples to pot roast. For example:

• Drupal Gardens is a hosted service built in PHP using a coupled model, offering few marketing tools and little in the way of customization ...