Web Content Management

Chapter 5. CMS Feature Analysis

This section of the book is devoted to describing the component features of common content management systems. I’ll start with a warning to set your expectations, then give you an overview of what’s to come.

Without wanting to seem overly pessimistic, this chapter is intended to set your expectations for a feature-level evaluation of content management. Understand that this isn’t an exact science, and if the border around a particular feature feels fuzzy and vague, that’s likely accurate.

The Difficulties of Feature Analysis

Before we embark on a detailed analysis of content management features, we need to make an important point: feature-by-feature analysis and comparison is hard. As much as we want this to be a clear science, it’s messy and imperfect.

Mathematics is a very objective science. You’re not going to get much argument about the answer to two plus two. There is a Grand Unified Theory of Basic Math that has been accepted and perfected over millennia about how math works. This truth is something that mathematicians can remove from debate.

Content management is not like this. There is no Grand Unified Theory of Content Management. You can pose an architectural question to five different bona fide experts and get five different answers (maybe six), all of which would serve to solve the problem posed by the question and can thus be considered “correct” to some extent.¹

Why is this?

“Fitness to Purpose”

In evaluating anything, we tend to ...