Web Publishing Software Functionality
Sunday, October 23rd, 2005 by MR
Previously I expressed some thoughts about current web publishing software, and I got a lot of great answers to the questions I posed. Now I’d like to take it a bit deeper and find out what functionality is really needed and what’s just fluff.
Plug ‘n Pray
I got some good answers in the comments section about what I was looking for, unfortunately, many of the answers told of afterthought features developed as plugins. Bernd says:
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.
Unfortunately that’s where a lot of the current offerings are coming from. Out of the box a large framework is developed that lets everybody and their brother write modules and plugins to extend functionality, but do we really need that? I just want the features I need, designed intelligently, from the get-go. Jeffrey Veen says it too after exploring open source CM solutions for a few hours:
What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience. It was software written by geeks, for geeks.
He’s right. I don’t see elegant solutions either. James Archer has a great point as well:
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.
Not Really “Content Management”
I mean web publishing, not content management. CM solutions offer taxonomy development, powerful workflow management, dynamic blah blah blah, and a lot more. I’m talking about web publishing software that lets me manage a weblog as part of a full website, a wiki as part of an intranet, templates that can be extrapolated across multiple pages, etc. To me that’s not really full-blown content management, but rather web publishing — you know, software for web designers with clients that aren’t in Fortune magazine. Or as Jason Fried would call it, the Fortune 5,000,000.
The Contenders
To their credit, I took a look at both ExpressionEngine and Drupal (different price points, but who cares) but they both made me cringe in humiliation as a web professional. I used a demo for EE and without clicking, couldn’t tell you what 2 out of the 7 top tabs (Communicate and Modules) actually let me do, but maybe that’s the usability junkie inside of me coming out to say hello, I’m not sure. Then I looked at some Drupal screenshots and was equally offended. It’s as though nobody who cares about the user experience designed these pieces of software. I mean, should I be accepting these as the best web publishing tools out there and just use them? Should I just accept this as the best we can do?
Fuck It, I’ll Make My Own
With all the spare time I have now (absolutely none, whatsoever) I’m going to do web publishing software my way. Everything I want, nothing I don’t want, and better designed than the rest put together. Made for people who actually need to get work done, and not just plop forums and photo galleries into their sites because it’s a button they can click. It will be built with PHP, let you use any template tags you want (define ones that make sense to you, what a novel idea!), and I’ll be designing the user interface first because the interface is the software.
I’ve got some questions, and hopefully you’ve got the answers. What’s really important to you? Do you need 5 different ways to deal with comments or would “on or off” be good? Are plugins necessary if the right functionality is built in from the start? How complex is your publishing workflow, and do you need software to manage it?
Make a list of the 5 killer features you need your web publishing software to have. Then remove 2 of them and let me know what remains. That’s how software should really be built: without superfluous bullshit that 1% of users need.
Reader Comments
23 Responses to “Web Publishing Software Functionality”
Wow. Someone is a little hacked off!
October 23rd, 2005 at 3:57 am
I was in the same position when considering the software to use for the upcoming (long overdue) redesign of my portfolio website. And after looking very closely at all of my options, I decided it was best to start from scratch and create my own (using Rails). It turned out to be a great idea; the system does everything I need it to and nothing more.
October 23rd, 2005 at 4:31 am
- ability to publish both static pages and posts
- Syndication
- Tags for categorisation
I took out comments and a theming system from my list of five (It wouldn’t do me any harm to design my owm stuff, I’m perfectly capable)
October 23rd, 2005 at 8:18 am
These Drupal screenshots date back from 2003.
If you want to try Drupal, use http://opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=132.
If you report back usability issues, we’ll try to address them.
October 23rd, 2005 at 8:51 am
At last, someone who shares similar thoughts on web publishing software! I’m right behind your back all the way on this. I’m willing to give all the needed support, full-on.
As for the 5 killer features, they are:
1. Instant publishing (no rebuilding whatsoever!)
2. Custom fields
3. User-defined template tags (so we can have kick ass designs with our great content, no generic crap)
4. Extensibility (very easy to upgrade and for developers to add new features as well as integration with other software)
5. Open Source! It’s gotta be open source, then we’re really talking.
October 23rd, 2005 at 8:54 am
I agree that the current tools all suck so I wound up rolling my own blog system. Nothing polished enough to share but I know exactly where to go if I need a new feature or don’t like how something works.
A cross-browser xhtml compliant text editor was very important but way beyond my patients/skill level. I found and really like RTE (http://www.kevinroth.com/rte/demo.htm).
October 23rd, 2005 at 9:24 am
Hopefully when said CMS is done it will be available to the public?
Also if you want to make your effort an Open Source effort, I’ll be glad to help!
October 23rd, 2005 at 3:57 pm
I think Mary-Ann hit it right on the head. Though, I might replace “syndication” with “plug-in support”.
October 23rd, 2005 at 4:45 pm
So, let’s be clear: I’m not a programmer. And I don’t want to be. I’m proficient with Front Page, but not dealing with HTML.
Having said that, it is exceptionally difficult to find a tool that would integrate publishing web pages AND having a blog (or two)without being able to at least understand where to copy and paste HTML.
I ended up at http://www.squarespace.com a few weeks ago. I am not saying this is the answer, but a possible approach to this software that you’ll write.
What I need:
1. Assumption to be able to publish regular web pages as well as the top ten features of a blog without having to know code.
2. Be able to seamlessly incorporate RSS/Adsense features into the web site and blog without having to copy and paste into an HTML page. If I can’t read HTML, I don’t know where to put it…
3. Be able to have private areas for subscribers that is accessible via user name and password so that special people who have registered can get more specialized content. This includes the ability to manage the user list automatically for subscribing and unsubscribing.
I’m probably at the way end of user friendly interface when you are looking at a target to write for, but hopefully, this will help.
Scot
October 23rd, 2005 at 6:18 pm
Well said Mike. I seriously believe that the best publishing solutions in the future won’t be compared so much by features (as they will all be mostly the same) but more by their design and user experience. I haven’t tried Drupal myself but while people say it is supposed to be so great, all I seem to hear is how frustrating it is to setup and use. I mean what good are powerful features if they are that complicated to use?
As for killer features, I can give you the biggest one I’m looking for that being the ability to dynamically create and change the display of my content into “focused viewpoints” without having to design a template from scratch every time. It would be kind of like how you can drag and drop data in Excel to dynamically create views/charts on the fly.
A “Record of Your Life” would be one type of focused viewpoint that would enable you look at your content by day, month, year, decade, or even life. That way I could filter my view by say “music” over the last “year” and see my “top five” albums for each month of 2005. Or if I switch to a decade view, I could see the top five albums for each year of the past decade (and thus the music that influenced me the most). Depending upon how you structure and tag your content, I could easily use this approach to filter my view by “work experience” to almost see a resume-like view of my past work as well. Actually by stacking multiple dynamic views together I could create a very close approximation of a resume by stacking my posts tagged with “work experience” on top of my “skills acquired” with my acquired “education” at the bottom.
Using this same stacked focused viewpoint, I could also replicate something like Seth Godin’s Squidoo by stacking my filtered posts of say Web 2.0 on top of articles I’ve found on Web 2.0 on top of a listing of sites that I’ve noted that deal with Web 2.0. Even more so, I could create my own focused ads at the bottom by listing all of the books I’ve read (with links to Amazon) that relate to Web 2.0 as well. Now imagine the same focused viewpoint for say tips on playing World of Warcraft.
What I’m really talking about here is having the flexibility to structure your content however you want in multiple different ways based upon what patterns you are trying to retrieve from the information.
October 23rd, 2005 at 6:47 pm
Sounds great I can’t wait to see what you come up with.
One thing I would love to see is pages! Not categories, but static pages that clients could add. A way to output an unordered list of all the pages within a section would be great too.
October 23rd, 2005 at 10:23 pm
As Dries said, the pointer you linked to are images from the 4.3 release of Drupal, at least 2 years old! Did you really gave Drupal a fair look and took some time to browse some Drupal sites and read Drupal.org itself? Did you really install it? Really? If yes, and Drupal doesnt fit your needs and you dont want to write a module for Drupal to fill the cap, feel free to start a CMS on your own. Best of luck!
True, Drupal has a steep lurning curve (for administrators at least) but once you get it, you got it! For recent (1/2 year old, new release due soon) Drupal screenshots, take a look at http://drupal.org/image/tid/40 Some excellent sites can be found at http://drupal.org/image/tid/41
October 25th, 2005 at 6:24 am
Damn guys, don’t shoot the messenger!
I went to the Drupal site and this is where it brought me. If these screenshots are as outdated as everyone is saying, why were they the first image gallery link I found? And why would I install something that still looks as ugly as Drupal does? You don’t have a second chance to make a good first impression, and Drupal blew it for me.
Like I said in the post, when I look at an application or a website it has about 2 seconds to not make me close the window in fear of the design jumping out of the monitor and attacking me. If something passes that test, then I keep on going, and if not then so long.
Software should look good and function the way I want from the get-go, and if it doesn’t, I’m not going to “give it some time” and adjust to it’s shortcomings, because what’s the point of that? I want software that has a world-class, intuitive user interface, and Drupal doesn’t have it. End of story.
October 25th, 2005 at 10:17 am
> why were they the first image gallery link I
> found?
dont know. did you use search? when i would click a normal way, i go to home > handbook > is drupal right for you? > gallery. there you have it, 4 clicks away!
> And why would I install something that still
> looks as ugly as Drupal does?
dont know. in case you wont install software because of the way the site looks, you dont get the beauty of abstraction layers between application and presentation. and even within the presentation layer, different layers (css, template’s, theme’s etc)
> You don’t have a second chance to make a good
> first impression, and Drupal blew it for me.
fine with me. if your attitude is “hey this site about a cms looks like crap, let’s not look under the hood to see what engine they have got. i’ll wright my own engine instead”, i can assure you that you made the right choise by /not/ going for drupal.
but if it fills your need from a webmaster pov or from a programmer pov, have a ball. no offense, do what you want. but in case you are a real programmer with a UI background, i think you missed out on the best CMS there is, drupal. It is not bloated, it does things 99% of the users want, not 1%. That is up to the modules. From a drupal pov, I am sad to see someone with a UI interest not join drupal since we need people like you!
So just a polite question, before you build your own CMS and spend 1000 of hours deciding userinterface, datamodesl, security, access rights etc, give drupal a try.
October 25th, 2005 at 1:27 pm
Bert,
I’m not sure if you actually looked at the Drupal site, but “Screenshots” is a link right on the homepage, above the fold, prime for clicking. I clicked and saw what I saw.
in case you wont install software because of the way the site looks, you dont get the beauty of abstraction layers between application and presentation. and even within the presentation layer, different layers (css, template’s, theme’s etc)
If you guys architected the featureset in the same manner you designed the interface, then no thanks. It’s like building a luxury car with seats made out of corduroy. It might go fast, but the wale will still chafe my ass.
October 25th, 2005 at 1:56 pm
path: home > screenshots > drupal > top one is 4.6. cant see why you scrolled down to find an ancient version and yell “yek, ugly”. either way, this discussion is going nowhere when all I want is for you to try out drupal before judging it and all you want is a site that looks as nice as the code is before you install it.
October 25th, 2005 at 2:43 pm
and all you want is a site that looks as nice as the code is before you install it.
Yes! I want a site that looks as good as the feature set it talks about. I don’t think it’s too much to ask :)
October 25th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
Every six months or so I waste about half a day researching all the different open-source content-management systems out there and come to the same conclusion: they’re fantastic for what they are but at the end of the day if I want to create a site that really does what I (and my client) want it to do, it is best to create it from scratch. I keep feeling like I am reinventing the wheel somewhat but I have come up with a CMS that is totally customisable with CSS and plug-ins that I can make it do whatever I want and, because it is not being used by a wider community, I don’t have to waste a huge amount of time and effort on total flexibility and documentation for those who don’t know how it works.
I still, from time to time, look around for a wonderfully versatile and intuitive system that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles and keeps things simple but so far I haven’t found one. I will keep an eye on this space, though!
October 25th, 2005 at 3:32 pm
Oh, one to keep an eye on is PHPWCMS (www.phpwcms.de), which, I think, has potential if the developer manages to roll out version 2.
October 25th, 2005 at 3:33 pm
What does the team at businesslogs recommend as a lite, simple, HTML (WYSIWYG) editor that is standards compliant with the code it produces? Many recommend Dreamweaver, but I probably will not use 90% of the features it supports (like most software really :)
October 29th, 2005 at 8:39 am
Hey Daniel, I’m not sure I can recommend any WYSIWYG editor… I’ve always hand-coded my HTML.
A great text editor on Mac OS X is TextMate from Macromates though. I highly recommend it!
October 29th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
To answer some of the questions outlined in the blog post: yes, plugins are absolutely essential to building a successful platform. Another nice feature (the reason I use TextPattern) is the ability to assign different templates to items that belong in different sections.
However, I don’t know if I agree with this as a rationale for developing a new platform. What’s to stop you from simply messing with the CSS that drives the backend of an existing platform?
November 3rd, 2005 at 3:07 pm
Just got the chance to reread your post again and I noticed some points that I didn’t cover in my last comment, particularly with regards to your following statement.
“I just want the features I need, designed intelligently, from the get-go.”
It’s funny because that sentence is so simple, yet conveys so much meaning. And that in itself is what the software that we use should be doing. It should be so very simple and basic, yet it should be able to convey so much. Actually, if you’ve ever read any technical stories about the beauty and simplicity of the Internet itself, you’ll find a common theme. Simplicity and flexibility are key elements of how the Internet works so well.
Therefore, when I’m looking for my ideal solution, I want its basic foundation to be just as simple and flexible. I don’t want to keep adding on plugin after plugin until the system gets overloaded and unusable. Instead I wan’t the basic building blocks of this system to be simple and flexible enough to handle any use I decide to throw at it. For this to work though, those basic building blocks have to be designed with flexibility in mind so that they are simple enough to use in any situation.
For example, Flickr to me at its most basic level is a photo journal (or stream as some people like to call it). A blog is a diary journal. Del.icio.us is a link journal and so on. You could have different journals (or streams) related to different “types” of things such as books, music, movies, and so forth. Another thing to remember here is that these journals themselves can double as ad journals as well. If I have a book journal well that’s also an ad journal because I could click on a book and go to Amazon.com to purchase that book.
Now Squidoo on the other hand would be an accumulated journal archive that is dynamically generated to show information from many different types of journals. For example, if I’m talking about a specific topic like web design, my Squidoo-like journal archive display is displaying those posts from my various journals that relate to web design. Here’s a breakdown of what my Squidoo-like journal archive would look like with diary, link, photo, and book journals combined into one view.
TOPIC: Web Design
Top 10 diary journal posts on web design
Top 10 link posts of web design “articles”
Top 10 link posts of web design “sites”
Top 10 photo posts of web design images
Top 10 book posts of web design
And so on.
Again remember that those top 10 book posts while being my favorite books on design are also ads which lead to Amazon.com.
Now forget about Squidoo for a second, how could you use these dynamic journal archives in other ways? Well, let’s say you want a web site where your home page is primarily focused on business yet as you get deeper into the site, you find other views that become more and more personal the deeper you get. I compare it to a business with the owners home in the back of the store or on the second floor.
You walk in the front door and are greeted by the owner in his shop. You see and talk about business. However, if the shop is just closing and you’re a friend of his, he may invite you into his home in the back and talk more about personal things (i.e. How’s the wife and kids?). Or being both avid painters on the side, you may say how’s your artwork coming along and he invites you to look at the large mural he’s painting in his outdoor solarium in his back yard.
Now again, what is a common element to these room or spaces? Well if we were to display these interests, rooms, or spaces on a website, they would again be just a dynamic journal archive showing elements from each of our different journal types. If I run a web design firm then my business space would almost be like the Squidoo-like journal archive I listed above but it also might include a couple more things from my diary and also a portfolio journal.
Top 10 diary posts talking about my web design “services”
Top 10 portfolio posts showing my best web work
Ok this comment is getting long so I’ll try to cut to the chase and tell you what I’m getting at here. By utilizing simple journals and journal archives you can take your existing content from your journals and dynamically display it based upon the focus (or lense as Seth calls it) of what you are trying to achieve. Of course, tagging is a big part of this as well and you definitely need more than just one type of tag (i.e. global Technorati Tag, local Topic Tag, etc).
Actually one thing I’ve noticed is that with these different views you could automatically tag your content when creating it in that same filtered viewpoint IF the system recognized the implied action. Therefore, if I’m in my Web Design Business viewpoint and I click on my “Create A New Journal Entry” button beside my Top 10 diary posts on web design, the system recognizes the view you are in and auto-tags the journal entry with those same tags used to create that filtered viewpoint. Thus my new diary post to my blog would be auto-tagged with “business” and “web design”. The beauty of this approach is that once you create your viewpoints, you barely have to tag anything again unless you want to add a new tag which later may be used for creating a whole new viewpoint as well.
Oh just one more thing that I noticed! When you start building your site this way, you start to notice that these journal types (i.e. diary, photos, links, etc) would be very rarely viewed on their own. Instead, most of the time you are viewing these journals through these different viewpoints instead. For example, yes people may enjoy looking at a person’s photo stream on Flickr but they enjoy more looking at the person’s photo sets or even a cluster of photos around an interesting topic or category (that the person’s photos may be included within). Thus each of these different viewpoints should have their own feeds as well so that people can subscribe to that particular viewpoint of interest.
November 4th, 2005 at 12:44 pm
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