A Look at Content Management Systems

We asked a bunch of web development and design firms what Content Management Systems (CMS) they typically use to deploy CMS-based sites for their clients – whether they build their own, or customise/hack existing solutions.

A few stated that they built their CMS solutions from the ground up using PHP, without using off-the-shelf packages. These were customised to be able to manage and edit sections that each client required, making them leaner and more user-friendly. Admirable!

Rails-based CMS solutions tended to be lower down in the list due to hosting constraints on clients’ servers.

Clients themselves tend to ask for solutions using Joomla and Drupal.

Joomla seemed to be a popular open-source choice, with continual development and bugfixes, although bloat may be significant.

Some developers we asked felt that Drupal was overkill for basic sites.

Some also named Expression Engine as an option which isn’t open source but seemed to have good support based on their user forums.

Textpattern also came up as a simple solution that was easy to use and implement.

The solutions named made up the following list:

Ruby-on-Rails-based:
1. Mephisto
2. Radiant
3. Substruct

PHP-based:
1. Joomla
2. Drupal
3. CMS Made Simple
4. Text Pattern
5. WordPress
6. Expression Engine

And for those building from scratch, Code Igniter and Ruby on Rails provide nice frameworks.

We like to look at CMS solutions based on three criteria:

1. ease of use for the user-admin (i.e. the client)
2. ease of customisation of views and templates to produce a unique look and feel
3. ease of development of site and required features

So we looked at a few of the above and this is what we think:

Rails-based solutions like Mephisto, Radiant and Substruct

These didn’t seem quite mature enough in terms of both built-in features and available extensions/plug-ins. Developers may find themselves hemmed in without sufficient features and spending time developing new features on top of the CMS code, in addition to customising the views and templates to make them look polished.

Radiant

Building and customising on top of Radiant may also be a little troublesome because modifying the template files may require use of their own markup language – radiant template language – which isn’t the same as rails view code.

Substruct

Substruct is really for building online shops (and seems quite good at that too), and the CMS support it has seems more suited to adding the extra html pages needed for the shop, rather than building functional site pages with rich features. The sites it generates tend to be shop-centric (with the shop as the main focus of navigation) and getting out of that mode could be a little troublesome. It’s the same idea as using WordPress to build a CMS site (instead of a blog) except WordPress is more mature and can handle the mutation better.

Textpattern

Textpattern seems to have a pretty good library of plugins including e-commerce, photo galleries etc., as well as a bunch of other resources. The user-admin interface is supposed to be fairly easy to use, although the editor only supports plain text, textile or xhtml (no WYSIWYG, which can be troublesome for clients).

Here are some textpattern-powered sites:
http://textpattern.com/featured
http://welovetxp.com/

Expression Engine

Expression engine is not open source (i.e. not free, at USD250 for a commercial licence) but it can do quite a lot of things, including mutliple weblogs, e-commerce, galleries etc.

There are three licences – the core version is free but limited, the personal licence is USD100 and the commercial licence is USD250.

It’s very easy to install and seems quite easy to use.

From the video tutorials, it looks like Expression Engine works in a similar manner to WordPress, except Expression Engine organises and manages content in multiple weblogs (while WordPress is a single weblog with a set of static content pages).

The content is stored in the weblog entries, and rendered/organised/mashed-up using the templates. Templates can also function as static pages (as in WordPress). So it’s easy to generate multiple feeds of content rendered as different sections on a single page. For example, you can have a news blog for a news section, an events blog for an events section, a photo blog for a photos section, and you can build separate templates to display each set of content on its own page, or your can build a single template to display feeds of content from each of the bogs on a single page.

That seems to be the gist of how content is managed in Expression Engine, although I’m sure it’s extendable further.

Since Expression Engine isn’t open source, their range of plugins and extensions is smaller than WordPress, although they do have e-commerce and gallery modules.

WordPress

WordPress seems to be an interesting option that you can customise (i.e. hack) into a CMS. Here are some non-blog-looking sites built using WordPress: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

WordPress also has a huge array of plugins generated by its open source community that widely extend the functionality of a WordPress site. That’s actually generated a range of e-commerce plugins to choose from like this and this.

There is also a wide range of resources for WordPress hacks: 1, 2

And articles on using WordPress as a CMS: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

So…

We’re not about to draw any quick conclusions right now, because this really is a very brief survey, but it’s opened our eyes to the range of solutions available, depending on what your client needs.

Thanks to all who participated in our research!

Talk to us: What are your thoughts about the above solutions, and what solutions have you deployed?

Shoplette x Tongue in Chic US$100 Shopping Giveaway

Just 5 more days to the end of the contest! Have a go! You might just win US$100 for shopping!

From the Tongue in Chic website:

Tongue in Chic and Shoplette have come together for a contest, and the prize is US$100 to do more shopping with!

All you have to do to participate is:

1. Login to the Shoplette website and post what you bought from anywhere, offline or online.

2. Embed the Shoplette post onto your blog by using the “embed code” provided, and link back to Tongue in Chic and Shoplette.

3. To let us know you’ve participated, email us@tonguechic.com with your name, age, location, and blogpost url (where you’ve posted your Shoplette post).

- Contest period: 1st-30th November 2008
- We will judge all entries based on the items you buy, whether it’s a total bargain or in good taste!
- You may send in as many entries as you wish, as long as each entry is accompanied by a separate blogpost.
- You may be in any country to enter this contest. Winner will be sent prize money via PayPal, bank draft or into their bank account.

For more details, please check out: Contest details

Smock Dresses Make an Appearance

Trendspotting on Shoplette: Smock dresses make an appearance. This one’s a tie-back with a little pocket from Urban Outfitters. Sweet!

UO silence and noise smocked tieback dress
(yes i know its uber ex but i LOVE it) from urban outfitters, United States

Long-lived Franchises

Talk about a long-lived franchise! I’m not referring to the Gundam franchise, although that’s been around for about 30 years now. I’m talking about 三国演义 (pinyin: sānguó yǎnyì), or Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a classic piece of Chinese historical literature written in the 14th century, making it 700 years old and still going strong!

The figure in question above is a character from BB Senshi Sangokuden, a new anime and toy series by Bandai/Sunrise, the makers of Gundam, mashing up one of its own franchises, SD Gundam (Super Deformed Gundam, or mecha expressed in cute, squashed propotions) with the story line and characters from the classic Chinese novel.

That’s intellectual property from 700 years ago (incidentally, depicting historical events from about 1,800 years ago) still getting remixed today. Eat your heart out, Mickey Mouse!

Are we still creating IP legacies that will last for millenia?

Starting Up in a Recession

There’s been much talk about how small businesses are going to survive the current economic downturn (do we get to call it a recession yet?), and whether it’s such a good idea to start a startup right now. Investment funds may be drying up and that means it’s a terrible time to be raising funds.

But for startups that are self-funded and aren’t looking to raise a tonne of cash, the situation is a little different.

A self-funded startup has two key directives – keep costs low, and generate revenue as early as possible. This doesn’t change in good times or bad, because in either case, the founders aren’t getting paid until their startup makes money.

If a recession comes with deflation in prices (or generous retail discounts enticing consumers to spend) and sends overall prices down, the founders might actually find it a little easier to get by, as living expenses fall.

If a recession comes with unemployment or deflation in wages, the founders don’t feel it as much as the employed (or previously employed), because they were unemployed to begin with, and their job security is in their own hands. To some extent, the opportunity cost of striking it out on your own may be marginally lower with deflation in wages. And if the startup is looking for co-founders or new employees, what better time to look for good people when wage expectations are lower and people view “stable jobs” like banking with suspicion?

It’s not all roses, of course. If the startup is banking on advertising revenue, this may be harder to come by as brands may reduce their advertising and marketing budgets during the recession.

If the startup is selling a product or service that customers pay for, you’d have to look at whether customers are more or less likely to buy your product or service at a given price during bad times, or whether that demand elasticity remains unchanged. You might have to lower your prices, you might have to give more value, but that’s really the same for everyone in a competitive environment.

We don’t think it’s necessarily a good or bad thing to be a startup in a recession. If you really want to start a company (and you do really have to want to for it to work), chances are, you’ll do it anyway. In any case, growing a startup means looking at the conditions and adapting, regardless of the economic situation we might find ourselves in.

Here are a few more interesting articles about this topic:

Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
Ask 37signals: Does “Getting Real” work in this economy?

Talk to us: Are you trying to start up right now? How do you view the current situation?

Swedish-style Stationery

Trendspotting on Shoplette: Swedish-style stationery from kikki.k. There’s something about Scandinavian design, isn’t there?

A6 Cute Diary 2009: Weekly from Kikki.K, Australia

Hello world!

We admire 37signals. There. We’ve said it. Now we can get on with it…

Mobrick started its life as a startup in the web 2.0 bubble at the end of 2007. Now, a year into our life, we’ve decided to bring all our interests, fascinations, discoveries and products together in a blog. If you decide to read our blog, you’ll learn more about our story and where we’re headed, and hopefully, we’ll learn more about you too.

We’ll be blogging about social technology, web development, product updates (for Shoplette, the Mobrick Engine and anything else we come up with), startup life, shopping, fashion and whatever else we think you might find interesting. Feel free to drop us a note about anything at all.

I think that’ll do for a first post. Stay tuned, and see you again soon!