(2003-03-04) Content Management Failures

Content Management System hell : A study by high-tech researcher Jupiter Research found that 61 percent of companies that have deployed the software for creating and managing content for the Web have gone back to manual processes for updating their sites.

I just told a friend from MedScape that if I were there I'd recommend:

• really narrow/focus my goals/expectations

• dump J2EE as being too complex

• use Lin Ux and Apache

• do something pretty low-tech for (content) page delivery, like old Medscape days (relatively static HTML pages with SSIs for pretty crap)

• Open Source content mgmt system based on Java (pick one of these frameworks), which outputs those static pages to delivery servers

  • I'd rather recommend Python/Zope, but I'm still not satisfied with Zope's documentation and architectural flux.

• might deliver navigation pages dynamically like our old Cold Fusion/Meta Data pages, or maybe have CMS re-bake those on an hourly basis or something.

• run 3 separate pairs of servers for static/content pages, dynamic/nav pages, and dynamic/application pages