The Corey Story

During the summer of 2007, I was lucky enough to participate in the Google Summer of Code with the WordPress organization. I was given the task of trying to improve the content management capabilities supported by WordPress. In my analysis, I crafted a concrete definition of what is included in a high quality content management system. In this definition, I listed four main pillars that a CMS must include to be an efficient system in terms of managing content. These pillars include:

• Content creation: Content creation is the functionality required by the users of the CMS. It is the portion of the classification scheme that deals specifically with usability. Factors include integrated authoring environment, powerful linking, and ease and efficiency of use. An integrated authoring environment ensures authors have a full range of access to all of the tools and features offered by the CMS. A CMS exhibiting this functionality would present a powerful development environment to its users. This correlates directly with the ease and efficiency of use of the CMS. No matter the number of features offered by the CMS, if it is not easy to use and navigate, it will not be a success. The CMS also needs to exhibit powerful linking ability, which means cross-links created between pages by the user must be stable against restructuring.
• Content management: Good content management stands at the core of a CMS. A CMS solution must include some form of central repository or managing center that offers a wide range of tools for users to work with their content. Some of the factors that will be observed for the purposes of this analysis are reporting and versioning control and authoring. For reporting, it is imperative that the CMS provide an extensive range of statistics and reports to its users. A nice addition to this requirement is the ability to allow the user to enable what specific reports they receive. Versioning control and authoring provides the user with the ability to store, backup, and manage their content. A good CMS will allow the user strict accountability of their content.
  
• Publishing: For published pages of the authors, it is imperative that the CMS collect usage statistics. This will delineate what are the most popular entities that the user possesses. It grants the user the ability to place a value on their assets. The CMS must also be able to support multiple formats such as PDF.
• Presentation: The presentation of a CMS must be usable, quick, and be able to be navigated effectively. The topic of usability includes, but is not limited to ease of use, efficiency, easy reversal of actions, and quality feedback. The CMS must look good, but be easy to understand and navigate. It should present the user with multiple methods of tracing and reversing their movement throughout the CMS.

Is interested in reading the rest of this document, please contact me at corey@b5media.com and I will send it to you

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.