Friday, March 6, 2009
A post on Smashing Magazine yesterday listed 10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS. It got me thinking (as I often do) about using wikis for web CMS, and what to look for in a wiki when you plan to use it to manage a more traditional public-facing web site. Some wikis are far more suited to general web content management than others, and these 10 points (with some modification) provide a good foundation of what to look for. Let’s look at each of those from the perspective of the wiki as web CMS.
Core functionality for a web CMS means making new pages, editing existing pages, and getting rid of unwanted pages. This area is where wiki functionality beats almost every major CMS product available. It doesn’t get any easier than 1 click editing.
The Mashable article makes a big point of separation of content from formatting, and that is a noble cause, no doubt. But I’d argue that for most small web sites (and most web sites are small), the person managing the content is the owner (or a direct employee of the owner) of the site, and can make appropriate formatting decisions. Yes, if you’re going to invite 20 computer novices to help build your web site, you’ll want to reign in their formatting capabilities to avoid a rainbow of colored text in your pages. But in my experience, people using a wiki as their CMS can employ self control. After all, they don’t want their site to look bad.
One more point that is specific to wikis: a WYSIWYG editor is a key feature for a wiki to be used as a CMS. There will undoubtedly be a few pages on the site where a specific layout of content is desired that is just not doable using simple wiki markup. Don’t forget, wiki markup was not invented to produce beautiful web sites.
This means uploading files. As with traditional CMS, wiki implementations differ here in terms of convenience and ease of use. In my experience, there are two kinds of assets: images, and file downloads. Images want to be uploaded and inserted into the content easily, file downloads (MP3s, zip files, PDFs, etc.) want to be displayed nicely on the page. There are wikis (EditMe to name one) that can easily perform both of these tasks with a simple version controlled asset management feature. How many web CMS tools version control your file uploads? I’ll save you the time: not many.
I don’t know of any widely used wiki tools that don’t offer full site search. It’s a fairly standard offering at this point. I’m in the process of adding comment and attachment search to EditMe, and I know that file content searching is available in at least a couple other wikis.
The important capability here is to be able to customize the search results. There will inevitably be content on the site that will be available to the search engine but that you don’t want to show up in search results. For example, if you have a white paper that you don’t want accessed without a form filled out, you won’t want a link to it popping up in the search results.
Speaking of being able to customize the search results… I’d go further and argue that a wiki/CMS should be scriptable. You (or a developer you hire) should be able to create forms that do things and generally program the wiki. General web sites can require all kinds of dynamic interaction that simple collaboration wikis just don’t need. So a development platform built into the wiki is key. The huge benefit here is that wiki-based development platforms are typically about as simple as web programming gets, while programming CMS engines is usually a nightmare.
The other side of this coin is the layout or template engine. You’ll want to be able to create multiple page layouts and apply them to different pages. This would allow, for example, the home page or landing pages to have a different layout from sub-pages. Take a look at the wiki’s templates and see if they make sense to you before committing.
This, of course, is another area where use of a wiki will save you all kinds of headaches. Make a section of your site publicly editable, or editable for registered users. Enable comments on certain pages to collect feedback, or add a forum to your site. Most robust wikis can do all this, while many traditional CMS tools are weak in this area.
Here’s an area where many CMS tools go WAY overboard. I’ve seen too many needlessly complex permissions and workflow systems built into web CMS tools. 99% of the time its over-kill and the simpler controls that most wikis provide (view/edit control for the whole site that can be over-ridden at the page level) can be a welcome relief. That said, some wikis are very weak on this point (MediaWiki, for one), so its an important place to do some homework before settling on a wiki.
Wikis version everything. Enough said. How many web CMS tools give you a diff of what’s changed between versions? Not many.
To be frank, I don’t think this needs to be in the top 10 for 95% of wiki/CMS users. Since you can create two sites with any product or service, it comes down to a simple matter of pricing and a little convenience. Some wikis provide multiple “spaces”, but this isn’t usually intended to act as multiple separate public facing web sites. If you need to sites, create two wikis. It will make splitting one off a lot easier down the road when you sell half your company.
I might replace this item with something more important, like SEO. When building a public facing web site, search engine optimization is a very important consideration, so it’s key to choose a wiki that has put some thought into SEO. This is a whole other topic, so that’s all I’ll say about it here.
Again, for a typical small web site, this is usually not a requirement in my experience. Supporting multiple languages adds an enormous amount of complexity to a web project and the wiki/CMS that runs it. While it is necessary for certain projects, it’s better left to the projects that really need it. There are certainly wikis out there that support multiple languages, if it is a requirement. It’s one of the search criteria at WikiMatrix, for example.
Like number 9, I’m going to submit my own number 10 as I don’t think multilingual support applies to most small web sites. How about accessibility? This is becoming an increasingly important area, especially as the US government gets on board and is creating web sites by the hundreds. They all have to abide by Section 508, so choosing a wiki that at least makes an effort at accessibility in its display of content could be important.
One nice aspect of choosing a wiki for use as a CMS is that there aren’t 10,000 candidates to sift through. There are really only a handful of wikis robust enough to really work well as general web CMS tools. Which ones? Well, that’s for another post.
