Recent Launch: Media Experts on Refinery CMS

Media Experts is a top Canadian media planning and buying agency. During the summer, I was tasked with the first iteration of their website, integrating it with Refinery CMS (thanks Dynamo!). One of the joys of using Refinery, is the ease of extending it with engines to support custom content types. For example the experts page seen below contained structured, repetitive data that was not suited for a page tree hierarchy:

By generating a custom engine, I was able to easily integrate this structured data into the website, without any impact on the original design or the website's navigation. You can view how the individual experts are edited in the screen shot below:

Please checkout the Media Experts' website and view additional screenshots below:

Home Page

Portfolio Index

What I need from a Content Management System (CMS)

Yesterday I started on a new CMS project. At the beginning of each project I like to reassess the tools that I'm using to make sure I'm not stuck using just what I know. To start, I listed some basic things I want from my CMS:

• Manages a page tree
• Can be extended to manage structured data
• Rich text editor
• Image Management
• File Management
• Link Management
• User Management

Image and File Management

These are the very basics. I originally had Image and File Management listed in as Asset Management. But I find that these are presented slightly different. Images are presented in a gallery, where "files" such as PDF's are listed in a "file" manager. The Image Gallery and File Manger are accessed directly to upload and organize new assets, and integrated into the Rich Text Editor.

Editor Integration

When inserting an image, this uses the image gallery to chose an image. When adding a link, this will either use the File Manager for assets, or a Page Browser to link to another page on the website. This is what I class as Link Management.

User Management

Most CMS solutions offer sufficient User Management in terms of authentication. However, granting authorization to specific areas of the website is more involved.

Advance Options

These are necessarily "advance", but to go beyond the basics, most website I work on are bi-lingual. Therefore I require some i18n for the administration interface and some method to manage translations.

Other features include search and versioning of content.

Extensible

Finally, it has to be extensible. As mentioned in my post A CMS is Not Out-of-the-box Software, a CMS is not a product until you have tailored it for you client needs. A CMS is a platform. They BrowserCMS team describe this succinctly in their presentation at acts_as_conference. Their slide summarizes this concept:

A CMS is Not Out-of-the-box Software

This morning I was doing a "Saturday" clean out of some old files and came across this snippet from Namahn regarding Content Management Systems (CMS). I originally came across this around mid-2009:

"Moreover a CMS is almost never a piece of software that comes out-of-the-box. Rather it is a platform/framework for building a custom content application based on an organisation’s needs."

Only for the simplest websites, is a CMS going to work out of the box. I have yet to be involved in a CMS project where there's not some customization required.

"To define the architecture of a CMS and the features it has to offer, you need to figure out how corporate content is created, how it travels through its lifespan, and the uses to which it is put. And because corporate content is created, maintained and used by humans, it is mandatory to define the different interactions people have with documents."

Most of the open source CMS platforms don't address the life cycle of the content. They are good at publishing the content, but never the workflow. Really they should be called Website Publishing Systems (WPS), not Content Management Systems. It would be nice to see more work in this area in the open source realm.

The "white paper" is worth a read if you're trying to get beyond the basics of content management.