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Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

#31

Post by bjplink »

You generally can't throw a rock in a crowded room of programming nerds and not hit someone who has built their own CMS these days. I've basically built my freelance career out of building and selling a set of CMS software and I'm sure others here could say the same.

For a simple term like Content Management System, it seems like everyone has a different interpretation of what that means. I think that alone answers you question about whether or not this is a solved problem. There's always going to be some target market with a need that can't be solved with current CMS software.

Re: Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

#32

Post by narag »

netcan wrote: post #4
ericwaller wrote: post #3

Content management is very definitely NOT a solved problem. Even if you restrict the domain to just blogging software, there are a ton of unsatisfied people (myself included). Blogging software is still bad enough that a bunch of people are still writing their own. A possible solution is something that's more than a framework but less than a fully functioning software package. I think that's the general idea behind d…

I agree. There are also constant give/take issues attacking it: Simplicity vs This feature, Power vs Eas of Use, Good tools for non technical people vs Fexibility etc etc. None seem to have gotten it down yet. Basically I agree. Content management is a lot less solved then spreadsheets or word processing.

There are also constant give/take issues attacking it: Simplicity vs This feature,

The obvious solution is to divide the software in two parts: a "framework" that takes care of storage, authentication, etc. and modules that implement features using the other part's API.

Re: Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

#33

Post by davi »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #23
davi wrote: post #10

I did some looking around a while ago and couldn't find anything that gracefully gives users ACL-like, fine-grained control over who can see which of their postings. This seems like a clear hole in the space, too me. I'd like to be able to create a group of users -- let's say by email address, so they wouldn't even have to be registered with the site at the time I created the content -- and then be able to post speci…

It just so happens that I just finished building a Drupal system that stores content until a user with a particular email address logs into a site, then shows it to them. Why don't you want the users to join an Organic Group? They don't have to explicitly join: you can have it happen invisibly at signup time. You can write code that intercepts the user as they register (or, better, just after they click an emailed li…

"I just finished building a Drupal system that stores content until a user with a particular email address logs into a site, then shows it to them."

Interesting -- public code?

"like so many Drupal problems, this will require some custom code"

Yep -- that's what I mean, it's an itch to scratch, not a tool I can deploy today. I wish I could deploy such a tool; it would be useful w/ my graduate work, which involves lots of collaboration w/ different groups.

It sounds like you're a heavy Drupal developer, and so your comment gives me some hope that if I were to try to implement this with Drupal, I wouldn't end up in a stinking morass. (At least not one I didn't make myself.)

Re: Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

#34

Post by aasarava »

dasil003 wrote: post #21
ericwaller wrote: post #3

Content management is very definitely NOT a solved problem. Even if you restrict the domain to just blogging software, there are a ton of unsatisfied people (myself included). Blogging software is still bad enough that a bunch of people are still writing their own. A possible solution is something that's more than a framework but less than a fully functioning software package. I think that's the general idea behind d…

I've used Drupal for a few projects as well as having written more than a few CMS solutions from scratch in PHP and Rails. I share your dislike for Drupal, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unimpressive. My gut instinct is that Drupal is about as good a hybrid framework/CMS as you can get. That's not to say other approaches might not hit your or my sweet spots better, but fundamentally I think it's operating at…

"You will never create an amazing design in Drupal. You will never create a successful startup in Drupal. You will never write a lean and scalable site in Drupal."

Can you substantiate these claims? It sounds a bit as if you're generalizing based on a bad experience in trying to use Drupal. And to be fair, Drupal does take a while to get used to -- you won't build an awesome site in the first week after untarring the package on your server.

However, all of the following sites were built on Drupal -- and there is nothing intrinsically fixed about their designs or their ability to scale, etc.:

-The Onion: http://www.theonion.com/

-MTV UK: http://mtv.co.uk

-Yahoo Research: http://research.yahoo.com/

-Ozzy Osbourne: http://www.ozzy.com/

-Moby: http://moby.com/

Re: Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

#35

Post by mechanical_fish »

davi wrote: post #33
mechanical_fish wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just so happens that I just finished building a Drupal system that stores content until a user with a particular email address logs into a site, then shows it to them. Why don't you want the users to join an Organic Group? They don't have to explicitly join: you can have it happen invisibly at signup time. You can write code that intercepts the user as they register (or, better, just after they click an emailed li…

"I just finished building a Drupal system that stores content until a user with a particular email address logs into a site, then shows it to them." Interesting -- public code? "like so many Drupal problems, this will require some custom code" Yep -- that's what I mean, it's an itch to scratch, not a tool I can deploy today. I wish I could deploy such a tool; it would be useful w/ my graduate work, which involves lot…

your comment gives me some hope that if I were to try to implement this with Drupal, I wouldn't end up in a stinking morass.

Oh, no, Drupal pregenerates the stinking morass for you. ;)

Well, it's not really as bad as that. But the person in this thread who pointed out that Drupal development is the art of compromise was on the money. And the learning curve for Drupal 5 can be rather like scaling a sheer cliff. It all depends on what you're trying to do, though. If you're willing to compromise your goals to fit the scope of things that you can convince Drupal to do right out of the box... it works out of the box!

Get a book or two. The Lullabot.com folks seem to be good teachers. In particular, if you find yourself wanting to write PHP for Drupal, get a copy of Pro Drupal Development and sleep with it under your pillow.

As it happens, my email thing is not public code. But perhaps it could be. I seem to have already identified one potential user! But the stuff I wrote would have to be factored out and turned into a plugin for Organic Groups, or perhaps interfaced with the Actions Module.

Re: Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

#36

Post by dasil003 »

aasarava wrote: post #34
dasil003 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Drupal for a few projects as well as having written more than a few CMS solutions from scratch in PHP and Rails. I share your dislike for Drupal, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unimpressive. My gut instinct is that Drupal is about as good a hybrid framework/CMS as you can get. That's not to say other approaches might not hit your or my sweet spots better, but fundamentally I think it's operating at…

"You will never create an amazing design in Drupal. You will never create a successful startup in Drupal. You will never write a lean and scalable site in Drupal." Can you substantiate these claims? It sounds a bit as if you're generalizing based on a bad experience in trying to use Drupal. And to be fair, Drupal does take a while to get used to -- you won't build an awesome site in the first week after untarring the…

I was a professional PHP developer for 4 years before picking up Drupal. I studied it. I read books on it. I built a half dozen sites with it. I participated in the forums. I submitted a couple patches. One thing I never did is "untar the package on the server" because I'm a real developer and of course I have my dev environment set up locally. Deployments are pulled from source control.

My closing statements were definitely hyperbole, but I fundamentally stand by them, both as a web designer and a developer. My opinion comes from experience, which I believe is more informed than looking at a bunch of sites without knowing what went in to each one.

The thing with Drupal is that it caters to generic needs very well. It will get you 95% of the way on any project with moderately standard functionality. However the last 5% includes fine design and usability touches that I take as a point of professional pride.

I had one project where I built the whole thing in Drupal in about 20 hours. After crossing the finish line, the client was unhappy with the checkout flow from the e-commerce section. I wasn't happy with it either, but it was just the way the module worked. Although there was no reason we couldn't re-work the e-commerce module, there was no modularity or unit tests to help with this kind of refactoring. I estimated the rewrite to be somewhere in the 20-80 hour range given the potential for massive breakage. In the end we decided to cut our losses and spend 40 hours rewriting in Rails. We fixed a lot of other design details along the way, and we have a lean 2000-line code base that we could extend in any reasonable fashion. Sure we couldn't drop in a forum/gallery/blog/library at the drop of a hat, but is it more important to have a million pieces of generic functionality at the tip of your fingers or to get the core user experience correct? It's bad enough when you have to fight with the client to get the UI right, but what I find truly unbearable is when everyone's on the same page, the ideal UI is clear, the logic is simple, yet you're encumbered by technology that's designed to solve 1000 extra problems you don't have at all.

Re: Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

#37

Post by arc »

I'll consider CMS solved when end users can create most any basic site -- to the pixel, with absolutely no XHTML or CSS written by hand coupled with a robust management and analytics framework. It's a ridiculously difficult problem to both create a system that is developer AND end user friendly that satisfies this requirement.

I think it's through the development of some new UI paradigms that this sort of problem will eventually feel more "solved". That said -- have you guys looked at Squarespace - http://www.squarespace.com/ (Disclaimer: My company.)? We have a pretty unique take on the problem -- with separate editing modes (content, structure) + an expansive module base + an excellent visual CSS designer + an extremely robust hosting core (think: S3 for pages). 5 years in business.

Definitely don't feel we've completely solved it, as evidenced by our system constant upgrades, but it's a great shot. If anyone on this thread is interested some facet the CMS problem, feel free to add a question.

Re: Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

#38

Post by tychoish »

aasarava wrote: post #34
dasil003 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Drupal for a few projects as well as having written more than a few CMS solutions from scratch in PHP and Rails. I share your dislike for Drupal, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unimpressive. My gut instinct is that Drupal is about as good a hybrid framework/CMS as you can get. That's not to say other approaches might not hit your or my sweet spots better, but fundamentally I think it's operating at…

"You will never create an amazing design in Drupal. You will never create a successful startup in Drupal. You will never write a lean and scalable site in Drupal." Can you substantiate these claims? It sounds a bit as if you're generalizing based on a bad experience in trying to use Drupal. And to be fair, Drupal does take a while to get used to -- you won't build an awesome site in the first week after untarring the…

Well, I think we're using the term design in a couple of senses. The sites you provide (and dozens of others, really there are a lot of awesome sites running on Drupal) are solid, clear, high quality websites. They have good visual designs and layouts, and they have managed to scale well. This is true.

They aren't groundbreaking websites, however. They do their job well and all of those sites are successful because their owners/content was successful before their current drupal incarnations were developed. I'm also aware that there are some sites that have launched their 1.0's as drupal sites, I think it's pretty safe to say that these sites are familiar conceptually (like digg, like slashdot, like etc.) In that sense they don't have "amazing" designs.

Perhaps we should rephrase this as "you will never create an innovative desgin in Drupal." I'm generally in favor of Drupal, but I think this is probably the truth.

It's also not a bad thing. Websites need to excel at presenting information above all else, and drupal sites provide a lot of power to make this happen. Most websites are adjuncts to other things that organizations and individuals are doing, and they don't need to "shift the paradigm of web design and architecture." Lots of people need websites like this, and drupal's ideal for these cases.

---

I think the "you'll never create a successful startup in Drupal," statement requires a bit of a clarification, but it's probably mostly true: given the constraints and assumptions of the platform, you're unlikely to create a new kind of website in Drupal that will succeed on the Internet. The next boom of new websites (like blogs in 2000, or social networking sites in 2004, or webapps in 2008) isn't going to be built in in Drupal first.

But it will be built in drupal second (maybe,) Drupal is great for making custom instances of websites that are targeted at niche/specific audiences. And that's a huge chunk of websites. It doesn't make a lot of sense to build highly local sites like "digg-chicago" and "digg-Sao.Paulo" all in custom-built perl or ruby based sites, when something like Drupal promises to make development and maintenance much more simple in the long run. These kinds of sites have a great deal of worth and potential.

---

As for lean and scalable.

Totally the truth. Drupal can scale, but it's a pain in the ass. Which means, a sliver of the huge gains made in development times and maintenance times is absorbed by increased architecting costs. Lots of memcache and hardware can fix this problem. But if you get to the point where you get to that level of demand, presumably you'd have to have a sysadmin on staff anyway, so I'll concede the point, but I think it may really be a draw.

Re: Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

#39

Post by teej »

henning wrote: post #14

Maybe the best approach is to do as Ruby on Rails did -- do something real, and then create your tool/infrastructure around/in reaction to that (in Rails' case, it was Basecamp and subsequent applications, as well as contributions by other working practitioners -- not stuffy people sitting on committees writing specs instead of applications that people use). So, in order to make a CMS, you ought to have some content…

Thanks for the advice on focus. I will definitely post my finished product.

Re: Ask HN: Is Content Management a solved problem?

#40

Post by TrevorJ »

Broadly defined, NO I don't think it is solved by a long shot. In the narrow Hey-look-I-made-a-multi-user-blog sense, then sure. But beyond that think there is still a lot of room for innovation. For instance, I've been looking for a CMS that would let multiple authors submit articles directly to a digg-style rank-based page, but none of the solutions work without a real mishmash of code. Also, it seems as if a lot of systems out lack good out-of-the-box rich media support. It would be nice, given that it is 2009 if you could record right from your microphone/webcam/still camera and publish to your site without needing some third party tool.
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