How to fix your broken CMS...

Question

Hello team Orchard,

Just read these interesting posts from a guy called Chris Murphy. He does a lot of work developing sites using CMS, and gives an analysis of what is wrong with current CMS solutions and how it could be improved. Well worth a read if you've not come across it before:

http://www.farfromfearless.com/2010/03/05/how-to-fix-your-broken-cms-part-1/

http://www.farfromfearless.com/2010/03/05/how-to-fix-your-broken-cms-part-2/

 

Cheers,
GC

Answer 1

Hey George,

I had a read of these articles you posted last weekend. I find some of it very interesting, as there is quite alot that can relate to where i work at the moment. Although we have implemented orchard for a housing site and soon will role out a large Registration system that is also using the orchard framework, we initially had problems trying to sell the system to the people higher up. My boss was recently in a meeting where he was talking about CMS's and all some people in the room kept asking about features this and modules that, how many plug ins etc etc... After that we got to thinking what would happen if a CMS system was implemented in a way where they were allowed to just install things whenever they want... Feature Bloat would creep in very quickly.

People also have the common misconception that the CMS is for everything. We use it to manage text, and other admin features behind the screens as well as build dumb pages (dumb = pages with no logic). Everything else is wrapped up in custom modules. But some people think that a CMS is the answer to all website problems.

Any ways... where i was going is that it was a good read and very interesting :)

Nick

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Blog - http://www.themayneissue.com Twit - http://twitter.com/NicholasMayne Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/nick.mayne

Answer 2

Very interesting links, thanks. The second part in particular has some very specific scenarios that we could act upon, beyond the general philosophy of putting user experience and workflow before all other considerations.

I could see, for example, the following features:

• A sources part that enables the initial author of a content item to publish the draft of her work into the publication workflow as a link to a document on the intranet, as an attached Word (or other) document, as a mapped transform of some external content or as text (what we have right now). It should be a simple task to transfer the contents of sources into the actual local instance of the contents (the Orchard content item) for formatting, editing and publication.
• A "my stuff" admin screen where an author can quickly find all the contents she created.
• Task & workflow-based, role-specialized admin dashboards. An editor's dashboard should be very different from an author's dashboard.
• A workflow module that allows documents to go back and forth between authors, publishers and editors until publication and after. That module must also expose external interfaces and integrate with existing workflows as inputs and outputs of the system.
• Of course document versioning, which we have at the infrastructure level but have not yet surfaced in UI.

Or did I misunderstand in parts or completely?

Answer 3

Of course... you could always vote for Workflow http://orchard.uservoice.com/forums/50435-general - I put + 3 against it and + 3 against Forms, as i think they both go hand in hand....

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Blog - http://www.themayneissue.com Twit - http://twitter.com/NicholasMayne Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/nick.mayne