December 15, 2006

The CMS Investigation Begins

So, today I started my big task of evaluating a variety of web content management systems to use on our web site. I came to the realization after a massive update of the site prior to our PDR that doing it all by hand, page by page, is really not the way to do it anymore. Just because it's the way I've always done it, blah blah blah... so I now have a developmental web server (it's such a cute little Linux box!) right here on my desk for me to install and play with all kinds of CMSs to evaluate not just for my own use, but (I hope) for my staff's use as well.

I have a dream where the engineers responsible for a subassembly update their own subassembly web pages. It might be a pipe dream, but it could be a lot closer to reality if there was an easy way for them to update their pages without having to log into the server, know HTML, et cetera. I've been monitoring the Web4Lib and SysLib listservs for quite some time and collecting comments about 9 different CMSs plus a wiki of some kind, and I just found CMS Matrix, which blew my mind. So I plugged in all the things I'd like to see, and it came back with two products that were already on my list, and one that wasn't. So I'm going to read up on them and next week, start installing and trying them out! Woot!

2 comments:

Christina said...

Have you seen: http://www.opensourcecms.com/ ?
It lets you try out various open source cms-es to see how they work.

Ruth said...

Nifty! I'd bookmarked the link to check out this week - thought it was more info, not an actual test site - that's great! I had planned on downloading and testing my top 5 locally, but I can use this now to narrow it down to, say, two to more fully test here. Thanks, Christina!