Content Management for Weblogs
Monday, August 22nd, 2005 by Mike Rundle
Weblog management software is a type of content management, so why do so many weblog publishing applications not let you handle other types of content in the same elegant manner? In my experience, all content you handle is called “posts”, “entries”, “articles”, “logs” — but how is that intuitive? By pigeonholing content into pre-defined terms, you’re virtually eliminating flexibility.
I like MovableType so I like to use it to power full-blown websites that may or may not include a weblog, and may or may not include additional pages outside of a weblog. Unfortunately, when used to provide a backend for a portfolio, an image gallery, a company bio page, a FAQ section, every piece of content you’re writing for those non-weblog areas is still referred to as a post, when it’s clearly not. I’m not writing a “weblog entry”, I’m writing a “Company Employee Biography”. I’m not writing a “weblog entry”, I’m writing a “Branding Work Portfolio Example”. To get around these shortcomings, you can create additional weblogs within your MT install that all shoot out different include files, which are then cobbled together into what you need at the end. Step back from your deep weblog publishing roots for a second and look at this scenario: I’m essentially hacking together my own functionality, forced into naming conventions that honestly make no sense (”weblog entry” = “Software FAQ Entry”???), and then expected to do some PHP/template trickery in order to make the software work the way I want it to.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this process lately, and it really doesn’t make sense to me.
The naysayers will tell me that it’s a MovableType-specific shortcoming, but it’s really not. WordPress works on the same concepts as MovableType, but it has custom fields. “Custom fields” do not equal “custom content template.” I don’t want to add additional fields to a “weblog post”, I want to define my content with my own fields and metadata titles, whether it be a weblog post, an image gallery, or whatever. This isn’t a WP-specific shortcoming, but rather a shortcoming for all weblog software. As soon as a content management application targets weblogs, then it’s all over. You now have no options and can only write “weblog posts” that have categories, keywords, a summary, and maybe some custom fields. Want to put together a dynamic employee biography page? Go ahead and start writing some weblog entries with the employee’s name stuck in the “Weblog Entry Title” field and their manager’s name put in a custom field called “employeeManagerName”.
If I want to have a dynamic company employee page, then I want to have one that makes sense to me, and to my client who will probably be updating it once we hand it over:
“Now remember, Most Important Client We Have, when you’re updating your employee biography page with a new employee, make sure to put their name in the ‘Weblog Entry Title’ field, their job title in the ‘Weblog Post Excerpt’ field, their background information in the ‘Weblog Entry Body’ field, their building number in the ‘Weblog Entry Extended’ field, and the rest of their information into the custom field boxes.”
Not only does this sound unprofessional, but what if they screw it up? Your $XX,XXX website design probably won’t look right if they put the employee’s full job description in the wrong place, and then your site template stuffs it into an H2 tag because it can’t adapt to user error. See what I’m getting at?
How To Deal
This isn’t MovableType’s fault, this isn’t WordPress’s fault, this isn’t TextPattern’s fault, and it’s not Blogger’s fault. I’m not placing any blame on the weblog software company’s laps, because it has nothing to do with them. They make content management software that works with weblogs, so why not make it work with weblogs?
Unfortunately, if I want to define custom content, make custom content templates and template tags, I need to jump up to enterprise class CM software territory, but what if I still want to run a weblog? What if I need weblog functionality (comments, trackbacks) but need it to be robust enough to handle my employee biography page with fields and dropdown menus named “Employee Name”, “Job Title”, “Team Name”, and “Building Number”? What if I want the software to be robust and flexible enough for me to define its functionality?
Now that’s a question I’d like to tackle. Anyone have an answer?
Reader Comments
25 Responses to “Content Management for Weblogs”
One word: Drupal
August 22nd, 2005 at 3:15 am
Honestly, in situations like this it’s often best to develop a custom CMS of your own. Of course, this isn’t practical for everyone, but it beats the hell out of paying for an overpriced, bloated “enterprise” CMS (just because it’s “professional grade” doesn’t mean you’re really getting what you’re paying for or that it will make content management any easier for you; more often than not it actually makes things *more* difficult), even if you need to hire outside help to get the job done.
August 22nd, 2005 at 5:53 am
Hey Will - Drupal lets me define my own content templates? I’ll have to check into it more.
Chris - You’re right man. More than you know :)
August 22nd, 2005 at 6:02 am
Mike, Expression Engine will do this is a much simpler framework to Drupal. You can define your own fields and meta data really easily. It’s exactly the reason why I develop using it now rather than any of the more Blogging specific software.
Check it out.
August 22nd, 2005 at 9:20 am
You’re so right on in your frustration. Those are all great blogging systems, but very blog-centric nonetheless. It’s exactly the reason why almost a year ago I started working with a (now growing) dev team on a fairly under-the-radar (on purpose) project: http://modxcms.com/
It’s really intutive to use. You’re not exposed to the “turbo-techie” parts unless you go looking for them. It’s guiding mantra to date has been satisfying all the requirements of Jeff Veen’s article on building a better CMS. We’re not there yet, but man is it better than anything I’ve used. In fact, it’s good enough that Chahn from http://www.opensourcecms.com, who has installed virtually every OS CMS out there, has now joined our team.
The beauty of it is, we’ve got it on our radar to run an instance of one of the major blogging systems inside our CMS, that is if we don’t wind up creating something more robust than our simple blogging system we’ve done to date. Any votes for which one gets done first?
August 22nd, 2005 at 9:48 am
Hey Mike, I’m with Chris — this sounds like a job for a custom CMS. Build it quick and light, include only the features you need, and tailor it to the job at hand. That’s what we did for a big project I just finished up, and it really helped us meet our goals while keeping the budget manageable.
My thought has always been to use a weblog CMS like MT when you don’t have the time or budget to build a custom system, or when you’re dealing with a dead-simple site. Once you start to scale beyond that, it’s not an unreasonable investment to DIY.
August 22nd, 2005 at 9:52 am
I have big hopes for RailFrog http://railfrog.com
geof
August 22nd, 2005 at 10:21 am
I’m always amazed at the ratio of the number of CM systems in the world to the number of CMS tools that actually do what I want them to. It’s something like 40,000 / 0.
I think that the two biggest problems facing CM systems are that they work on adding features rather than improving existing features, and that they’re often designed by software engineers rather than designers. Instead of a tight, smoothly-operating and flexible content management system, we too often wind up with some abomination like PostNuke.
I’ve been using a home-grown CMS for client sites for the past few years, and I’m not sure I’ll ever find an existing third-party tool to replace it, simply because I don’t think anyone will come up with a one-size-fits-all (or even -most) system.
August 22nd, 2005 at 10:27 am
Mike: check out “Pages” in WordPress. You can define it’s own custom template, custom URL (for example /contact/ or /clients/ and they work as “sections” for a website, not weblog entries.
August 22nd, 2005 at 10:28 am
To follow up on Will…yep, Drupal. Specifically, the flexinode add on, which has something like a dozen field types defined, from plain old text fields to image fields.
This is actually in preparation for (many months out) re-write of Drupal to be a custom field container. That is, the “blog” will be nothing more than a pre-defined set of fields called “Title”, “Body”.
And if Drupal is pretty close to what you need, it’s a very good framework for building custom solutions on top of. Ping Will or myself if you want to talk more.
August 22nd, 2005 at 10:55 am
Everyone wants a custom solution when it comes to content management systems. Drupal is ok, but its hardly a plug in and go CMS.
also, holy crap that RailFrog logo is bad.
August 22nd, 2005 at 12:07 pm
Just add a Weblog Manager into the Plugin Architecture of the CM, just like you add a News Database, a Forum or an RSS Aggregator.
With typo3 it is for example possible to include PHP modules, and with S9Y it is possible to run embedded. So you can have both words.
The only problem is, there is no reuse between the both. For a more integrated approach you will have to use a weblog plugin.
Bernd
August 22nd, 2005 at 4:57 pm
Drupal is good, no doubt, but Wordpress’ “pages” feature is awesome. I have done a lot of tweaking to wordpress to make it “my CMS”. The code is so easy to implement and make “yours”.
I have created a my blog/article site (Dev-News) a great place using wordpress. I also did a Church site, that isn’t even a blog, much more of a business/content site, using Wordpress as my backend, and it works like a charm.
Someone mentioned Expression Engine? That costs money, and Drupal, nor WordPress cost any money. It’s much like comparing WordPress to MT. MT costs money, WordPress doesn’t. Yes, I do know they have a free version for one blog/one user and no support.
The think is, I believe with an open-source community, there is much more room for growing. Not only this, but have you seen the plugins for WordPress?! There’s so many, and they are the easiest things to implement into your WordPress site.
So if I were to lay it out, the order would go like so:
Wordpress–>Drupal–>MT–>[something opensource that complies to the web standards]–>EE
But then again, what do I know, im only an 18 year old standards compliant, open-source nut, right?
August 22nd, 2005 at 11:52 pm
I like wordpress cause its free and not much difficult to customize. I am also planning to use it as backend CMS on a large portal site.
August 23rd, 2005 at 2:12 am
This is the very reason I found myself at Drupal’s door coming from WordPress after wanting more and looking at many a CMS. The flexinode module as Boris suggests allows me more flexibility there. The problem with Drupal is that it doesn’t showcase everything it can do well straight out of the box and can take time to get your head around to do exactly what you want. The framework is there, just needs to be worked on, by designers, and like James suggests, no one-size will fit everyone. CivicSpace is another option based on Drupal worth checking out.
August 23rd, 2005 at 2:56 am
I think James hit it on the head — the problem isn’t that some of these CM solutions don’t provide what we’re looking for, it’s that what we’re looking for is “plugged in” as an afterthought. I want the CMS to be tight, flexible, running on a small codebase, and designed by thoughtful designers. I want it to do exactly what I need, and be robust enough to do other things later on.
Also, I want a template tag system that looks more like English and HTML than PHP. Not that I don’t know my PHP, it’s just that I think MovableType’s template tags are just so elegant that when I look at how WordPress content is grabbed it makes me cringe.
August 23rd, 2005 at 3:15 am
One of the biggest frustrations I have seen thus far is that systems are being referenced as CMSes.
Wordpress. MoveableType. Expression Engine.
These are not Content Management Systems.
As an enterprise CMS developer, I am growing increasingly irritated with the trend to call these things a CMS system.
Wordpress and it’s kin are content publishing systems. A true CMS allows you to do almost anything with content - a single repository or collection of repositories (XML, DB) that manage one entry of content to be repurposed anywhere - web, print, et cetera. They not only handle the Authoring of content, but aquisition and aggregation of content. They can aquire content from RSS, Atom, scanned documents. They can divide it into components and augment the ‘content blocks’ into a metadata framework.
Building a CMS is hard, and most of the Web Publishing Systems don’t even scratch the surface.
… of course, that’s just my two cents.
August 23rd, 2005 at 2:31 pm
Ryan - Great call. Sometimes bloggers get insulated within the MT/WP world and forget that enterprise class CM systems do 50x more than just publishing data.
August 23rd, 2005 at 2:40 pm
We’ve put a lot of work into making Movable Type appropriate for lightweight content management (and no, we wouldn’t argue that it’s a good replacement for a heavy-duty enterprise content management system, nor would we argue that most people enjoy using those systems).
But to address your most salient point: It’s possible to easily customize the interface in Movable Type to describe the fields in the way that you’d like. We even provide extensive documentation for that functionality.
And I think you speak to one of the big strengths of a platform like Movable Type (or TypePad): you can create the templates in Adobe GoLive or Macromedia Dreamweaver, instead of having to know scripting or any other geek technologies. Even the big enterprise CMSes don’t usually permit that sort of easy customization. We think that’s a big plus in making your content follow the design you need.
August 23rd, 2005 at 4:54 pm
Expression Engine is indeed nice - probably as good or better than MT in features. The data modeling is quite powerful for the price
Which brings me to my next point: free is not always the most cost-effective solution. While Drupal may be free, trying to get my brain around it was going to cost me too much time and stress to learn. Sometimes paying just a *little* goes a long way, even for the serious hobbyist.
Symphony21 looks interesting - using XSLT for templating.
August 23rd, 2005 at 5:02 pm
Content Management für Weblogs
Mike Rundle schreibt sehr interessante und lesenswerte Gedanken zum Content Management in Weblogs - Movable Type, Wordpress, Drupal, Expression Engine etc. Kommentar unbedingt mitlesen!
August 24th, 2005 at 2:05 pm
Wow, after I read this, and thought about the project I was working on, this makes a whole lot of sense. I’ve been trying to develop a site using Textpattern, but, especially in the “events” category it was lacking. I looked at Drupal/CivicSpace and it made a little bit more sense than Textpattern, but, with more “features”, you lose the customizability that you get with Textpattern.
As of now, I’m still looking, and, if I don’t find anything else (looking at MODx), I guess I’ll remain with TXP for the time being,
August 24th, 2005 at 9:26 pm
Great post. Couldn’t agree with you more…
We have used Sharepoint to achieve this fairly painlessly and at a low cost.
I use blogger for my personal blog, but for our clients who run on the Microsoft platform Sharepoint is the way to go.
It’s highly customisable, feature-rich, reliable, integrates with custom business applications and MS Office and comes for free with Windows Server 2000/2003. If you already have Microsoft servers this is simply a no brainer.
Some of our clients choose to use Sharepoint as an public website and internal intranet and document management system in one. So they can easily share selected business documents or lists with their customers securely, or publish to the world as a blog entry or website content item.
Nick HaC
http://www.nickhac.com
September 9th, 2005 at 8:43 am
Well, gang, this is a helpful conversation. I’m late to it, so I’ll only say thanks and add a couple of comments.
I’ve used TypePad, MT and Expression Engine to run blogs and entire sites of varying complexity and needs. I would only add that I’m not a coder and have found all these systems accommodative.
The new MT I think has a plugin for custom fields, by the way, but Expression Engine accommodates that functionality so easily. + they have a forum module built in.
I’m building a project right now that I’m thinking of using Drupal for various reasons, but am daunted by some of the comments I’ve seen here in terms of wrapping my brain around it. That may send me back to Expression Engine, because even though it does cost money, it’s put together really well in terms of flexiblity.
Bud Parr
Sonnet Media,
Chekhov’s Mistress, 9rules member
October 21st, 2005 at 1:52 pm
I have been using wordpress for my blog and i like to use movabletype for my next blog.
January 4th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
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