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Ask HN: What is the most modern CMS?
I work as a interface designer on a CMS, among other products. In doing some research for further developing our CMS I had a hard time finding systems that were easy to use for a non-techie.
Which CMS would you say is the most modern in terms of end user design? Not accounting for the technical setup of things, just user experience.
Thanks you :)
Edit: Some seems to think I'm looking for good CMSes for web designers, I'm not. I'm after systems that makes it easy for a non-tech crowd to run their - custom - web site.
- msacks 16y agoMost CMS systems leave the design up to the developer. The UX components are based on how well you lay over CSS, JavaScript and graphics. Drupal and Wordpress already have rich theming systems and a lot of (out-of-the-box) themes that give a nice UX. For something a bit more advanced you could use something like Apache Lenya.
- lovskogen 16y agoI'm sorry for not specifying more. I'm interested in the part of the system that does the editing, not the theme for the site. The use case where the owner updates his site with new content.
- azrealus 16y agoI really like goodie.com and flavors.me. Although they are not full CMS the way they mange content is very impressive.
- lovskogen 16y agoI see them more like services than a full blown CMS, but thanks for the input.
- mrj 16y agoI've been running dotCMS for 1.5 years now, and it's worked great. The templates are almost pure html, so designers will have free reign.
- lovskogen 16y agoI'm sorry for not specifying more. I'm interested in the part of the system that does the editing, not the theme for the site. The use case where the owner updates his site with new content.
- knieveltech 16y agoIn that case my vote absolutely goes with Drupal. Having the ability to define new content types and add/remove form fields (link list? add a URL field. Need an event? Add date fields, etc) as needed is huge. Drupal also handles complex editorial workflows easily with the Workflow module, can support embargoed content, does simple content revisioning and provides limitless ways of organizing content.
- lovskogen 16y agoBut does it have a friendly interface for non-techies?
- knieveltech 16y agoI think so provided we're only talking about adding, editing and deleting content. It's also worth noting that UX has been receiving a huge amount of attention with the Drupal 7 release and is an ongoing topic of serious interest among module developers.
- lovskogen 16y agoI had a hard time over at Drupal.com finding screens of the interface the client is presented with when editing and managing content. As a rule, if the CMS puts you away from your page and to a list of "posts" to edit with TinyMCE, it's not modern. Atleast in my book.
- knieveltech 16y agoI'm not sure what screen you're referring to. Perhaps the admin content list? Typically content producers will add content via the "add content" link/button (depends on your theme), edits are possible from any screen where the content is displayed. Drupal supports a number of rich text editors, TinyMCE is only one of them.
- tptacek 16y agoPlenty of non-technical people set up Wordpress as a CMS. Squarespace is an extremely popular hosted CMS that aims at nontechnical people. Drupal seems to be one of the most popular CMS qua CMS's.
- lovskogen 16y agoWordpress with a theme is more like a service. Squarespace is a valid system, although their 'templates' might just make them a 'richer' service. Joomla is what I'd call a full blown CMS. But would you say the interaction is worthy a title à Modern CMS?
- ilamont 16y agoDrupal and Wordpress can be configured/customized in ways that are easy for users to use (or an absolute nightmare) depending on the template, functionality and design choices made by the site owner. For blogging and news, Wordpress seems to have the most flexibility in terms of design. There really are some beautiful templates out there (see http://wordpress.org/showcase/ http://wordpress.org/showcase/ for some examples). But Drupal goes beyond blogging. There must be thousands of available modules, offering all kinds of functionality, ranging from advertising support to "relevant content" boxes. (search http://drupal.org/project/modules http://drupal.org/project/modules to see some examples).
- lovskogen 16y agoWordpress with a theme is more like a service if you're not a webdev. Drupal is too (with Joomla) what I'd call a full blown CMS. But would you say the interaction is worthy a title à Modern CMS? reply
- ilamont 16y agoIt's boils down to a tradeoff between design simplicity and functionality. Honestly, I haven't seen any Drupal designs/UXs that have really bowled me over. But I think the reason for that relates a lot to the fact that the sites that prefer to use Drupal want to take advantage of the additional functionality offered by modules. The modules often add a lot more boxes, navigational options, and other major elements (forums, e-commerce, etc.) that make the UX far more complex than what you might find on a Wordpress blog.
- lovskogen 16y agoTrue, but even Wordpress puts all it's editing in a seperate admin area, like it's been done the last 20 years of CMSes.
- Ueland 16y agoWordpress, end of story.
- knieveltech 16y agoBrief: There really isn't a single CMS that outshines all the rest. You should carefully tailor your choice of CMS's based on the site specification. Not so brief: The underlying assumption here is that ongoing maintenance of a modern website is (or even can be) a non-techical task. This is unfortunately unrealistic. As an example consider the needs of a "simple" single user blog. Any blogging CMS worthy of the name should provide a simple interface for adding, editing and deleting content. It should also provide a simple interface for choosing which content is displayed on the site and most do. Well and good, but what about related content? Should a user be shown a list of related links when the view a blog post? How is "related" content defined? Is this limited to content on the site or should off-site links be included? Should this list be sorted by date, relevancy, popularity? What about rich text formatting or pasting content from MS Word? Most blogs also have some mechanism for accepting and displaying reader comments and just about every CMS I've ever come across has some method of handling this. But again we run into problems. Spam is a real issue and spammers have taken to using mechanical turk and other methods to get real live people to post spam for them. This approach completely bypasses captcha and even the best automated anti-spam services (mollum as an example) can't catch all of this, so now you've got to include manual comment moderation (which is a shitload of work on a heavily commented site) into the mix. Generally blogs also have RSS feeds and social media links. Most CMS's handle these fairly well without a lot of tinkering but it can get interesting if you (for example) want to segregate your content into multiple feeds based on subject matter or whatever. So even with a "simple" site the end user has a lot of potentially very technical decisions to make regarding how content is displayed, who can see what, who can comment, how comments are moderated, and what (if any) content is syndicated. Note this doesn't even get into SEO or analytics. The point I'm getting at here is even simple websites can be miserably complicated little beasts and unfortunately only so much of this complexity can be abstracted before you start running into issues where the available feature set isn't a good fit for some/most/any websites. With that said each CMS I've studied attempts to solve some subset of the problems associated with creating and maintaining a website. Which subset is tackled varies wildly from CMS to CMS. For example Wordpress does an excellent job of solving most of the problems associated with implementing and maintaining a blog. I wouldn't care to implement a company intranet portal with it though. Drupal is incredibly flexible, with plugins available for just about any feature set you'd care to implement. It is brilliant when a site has a complicated or fiddly feature set, but can be intimidating to end users due to the steep learning curve involved. As such it's frequently overkill for truly simple websites. Various other CMS's have their own core competencies and tend to shine in the situations they where developed to work well for. If you're looking for something to pattern off of my suggestion would be to first figure out which CMS you would reimplement your site in if you had the option and then go from there. Edit - Full disclosure: I'm a contributing developer for several Drupal modules.
- clistctrl 16y agoAs a sitecore certified developer i feel inclined to pimp it :) If you're looking for a great .net based cms, its the best.
- lovskogen 16y agoIf your doing self promotion, please elaborate on why it's great.
- jules 16y agoWhat features are you looking for in the CMS? Just content on pages? -> use a password protected wiki?
- lovskogen 16y agoThe feature I'm trying to dig up while doing research is a friendly interface for the people managing the site after delivery from webdev/designer.
- Andaith 16y agoWe use expression engine(http://expressionengine.com/ http://expressionengine.com/) where I work mainly because the back end interface is highly configurable for us and very easy to use for our clients. Everything is laid out quite consistently and it has everything our clients need(with a few extensions). It's also really easy to create extensions for any functionality a client would want that isn't provided out of the box.
- lovskogen 16y agoI wrote this in a comment to Drupal, how does it hold up to EE? "As a rule, if the CMS puts you away from your page and to a list of "posts" to edit with TinyMCE, it's not modern. Atleast in my book."
- Andaith 16y agoI've never used Drupal, but EE gives you more than just a TinyMCE field. You can create as many fields as you want. The four defaults are text input, text area, date field, and file field, but you can add new fields through extensions to get WYSIWYG, table fields, etc etc. These can then be ordered on the publish page how you want, made required fields, searchable, enable or disable HTML, etc, so it gives a lot of control.
- lovskogen 16y agoBut where are those fields put? If it's in a admin interface away from the site I wouldn't call it a modern system.
- pierrefar 16y agoI think most CMSes are a balance: how general are they so that they can be useful to many different use cases vs how complicated that makes them. All these CMSes bring their own terminology too. WordPress keeps it simple: it's a page or a post. Leaves it up to you to interpret what that means. Drupal takes that a few steps further with content blocks. Joomla, when I last used it, was like having pages ripped from a book, shredded into tiny pieces, and jumbled into a pile. So when judging end user design, I'd also mention the context and the use case: Do I simply want to produce content that is sorted in reverse chronological order? Do I want to be able to handle all types of content imaginable or just text? And what kind of meta data are you keeping track of in conjunction with the content? Meta data is the author, category(ies), various timestamps, etc.
- lovskogen 16y agoI'm also interested in propietary CMSes by web bureaus. Wordpress, Dupal and Joomla does not make for a good custom site experience. Either too generic or having a gui that is too complex and hacky for mere mortals.
- knieveltech 16y agoYou raise an excellent point here. Any custom site implementation is going to require some custom code to nail down the user interaction. This is a fact of life regardless of what CMS you're using.
- lovskogen 16y agoYes. But does a CMS do this in a good way? Custom fields inside a admin interface is not a very modern approach.
- knieveltech 16y agoI'm sorry but I don't agree. Having the ability to define custom data entry forms (including unique field types like calendar dates, google maps location pickers, etc) and the data storage that goes with them via a web interface with no coding required seems pretty modern to me. Can you point out an example of another approach that seems better to you?
- mattsouth 16y agoI find it somewhat comforting that folks are talking about drupal which I've found excellent for creating sites, adding features and keeping them updated and have been advocating strongly in my organisation, having had fairly poor experiences with other CMS products. But my non-technical colleagues seem to find it simultaneously overwhelming and too restrictive for adding and maintaining their content. Those same colleagues are currently keener on a slightly more modern CMS called modx, which seems to be both more configurable and provide a better non-technical experience. However, modx is being championed by a technical colleague of mine, and I havent had the the opportunity to properly compare the installation, configuration and maintenance experience to drupal.
- lovskogen 16y agoIt's those mere mortals favorite CMS I'm after. The ones suggesting WP, Drupal and Joomla seems to do so because of the tech side, not so much the ux for the client getting the system after delivery.
- te_chris 16y agoSilverstripe. Open source BSD licensed built ontop of a quite nice MVC php framework that takes a lot of influence from RoR. Is a dream to build both basic and powerful CMS driven sites in. And has a templating language that is like a simpler Erb. No I don't work for them, I just think it is by far the best CMS I've come across
- lovskogen 16y agoYou're not a mere mortal, but a techie ;-) I want to know if there is any CMSes that has a great experience for the people managing the site after delivery.
- te_chris 16y agoHa, fair point. The interface is pretty simple though and with the sites I've worked on the content editors have normally found it pretty nice to work with :) here's a demo site http://demo.silverstripe.com/ http://demo.silverstripe.com/
- lovskogen 16y agoI wrote this comment for Drupal, I seems it's also true for Silverstripe. i'm sure it's a nice CMS, but doesn't give a modern experience when working with content. "As a rule, if the CMS puts you away from your page and to a list of "posts" to edit with TinyMCE, it's not modern. Atleast in my book."
- superk 16y agoI thought SilverStripe was pretty good when I first looked at it. The framework it's built on is actually not as good as they hype (in my experience) and documentation lacking... but from the enduser standpoint it is a pretty good mix of ease-of-use and power. The blending of traditional concept of posts and versioning of a wiki - all centered around the mighty URL - was one of the best executions I've seen.
- scorpion032 16y agoIf cost is no object, you should be looking at: http://www.ellingtoncms.com/ http://www.ellingtoncms.com/
- lovskogen 16y agoDo you care to elaborate?
- scorpion032 16y agoSure. It is the best CMS out there, the one django was originally carved out of. A few django core developers still work on that and it is the framework used by all the major news companies in the world. But comes at a high price.
- lovskogen 16y agoAll the major news companies? Don't see that on their page. I don't find any screenshots of it in-use, could you help me with that?
- NHQ 16y agoI'm just entering the world of CMS design, after having tried many. I tried them for myself, and for client websites. Then I started looking into making my own, to solve my own problems. However, based on my experience, I would say there is no CMS that is good n easy for the non-techie. The fact is, you have to become somewhat techie in order to proceed on any of them, unless you just want to blog. Custom CMSs are the way to go (not customizable, like drupal: custom made). This is, for me, the biggest advantage of document databases. I'm new to software design, and self taught, but not a coder. I've never tangled with a relational database yet. It's incredibly easy to design case-specific CMSs with document databases. It all boils down to form design.
- lovskogen 16y agoSad fact, but I'm starting to believe there is none.
- NHQ 16y agoIf the CMS has a special Admin page, then it is not a CMS for the non-techie. Administration can be no more than filling out forms, uploading images, etc, etc. No plugins, no DBs, no hosting, no nuthin'.
- lovskogen 16y agoI agree.
- andybak 16y agoI'm not sure I understand the point being argued here.
- lshepstone 16y agoI don't agree. I can show you some form based screens where a non-technical user can create some content and publish it fair easier and quicker than using an in-context editing approach. I raised the point in comments above, but there is a big different between creating a new page from scratch and using a simple form to create a templated page. WordPress (or any blogging tool) doesn't make you build your blog post as a page draggin modules onto it...they give you a special admin page where you just fill in the title and body text and click publish...what could be simpler? In-context editing does work great for many use cases, but it doesn't work well for some. Think about when you need to create a slightly interactive web page...not just a simple static one. You'd like one section of the page to fade in/out when the user hovers over an image for instance...I haven't seen anyone pull off an in-context UI that makes that easy but I've seen some great form based UI's that make that 30 secs work for a non-technical user. Check out the Carrington Build WordPress plugin (no affiliation) for a decent example of providing users with a very simple admin page builder drag and drop layout tool. I do wholeheartedly agree that very few CMS tools have an awesome UI for business users...maybe you can change that.
- lshepstone 16y ago(Disclosure, I worked on this product in a previous life) So this is an enterprise CMS example, but the UI did get some pretty decent feedback from customers. Have a look at http://media.vignette.com http://media.vignette.com and you can see some screenshots. This product was targeted towards media companies (Gaming companies, Online media/news sites, video producers etc) so it did allow us to focus on some specific needs. You can imagine that with the volume of content that news sites produce, their requirements can be a little more high-end that your average user as they can spend 6-8hrs a day in the tool. After designing and implementing quite a few CMS platforms, I think it is pretty hard to come up with a UI that will be appropriate for all users as many of them come to the tool with very different tasks in mind. Think about the legal guy or manager who just needs to approve something, the creative team who needs to upload some assets, someone working on a page or content, a marketing person who just needs to put some promotions on the site. Even within a media company there are people with pretty distinct roles and tasks they own. Therefore in our last UI we built the notion of workspaces...there was: - a Review Workspace which had an optimal layout for reviewing and approving content - an Asset Workspace which was optimised around batch uploading media, resizing it, a filter based UI because the library of images/videos tended to get pretty large - a Marketing Workspace just for the marketing team who is normally responsible for creating new promotions, and then deciding where they go on the site. Not every site needs this, but for those that do it worked pretty well as the marketing team just saw this workspace when logging in and didn't have to learn or care about all the other areas of the CMS. - And of course don't forget the Content Workspace where you can create content and pages :-) - For smaller shops, the workspaces are all accessible to multiple users, it is just the notion of the right UI for the task as opposed to one UI for all roles and tasks. Not suggestion these are universally appropriate or right for your customer base, but I think on close examination you'd find at least 3-4 profiles of users or common tasks that can be optimised. The result for optimising for the 80% common tasks in this system meant that certain complex tasks could be done in <5 clicks. While I personally rate WordPress very highly for UI, the users we were designing for used this products for many hours a day and they felt WP was too many clicks, especially for media handling. I've probably droned on for too long already and so there is not enough time to list every UI tweak and feature we created, we spent 2 years on the UI, but here is one example. Dynamic UI Controls based on dataset size: A common problem with a number of CMS tools we found was that the UI designer made a guess about how much data would be in the system for a certain task, and then design a UI control that might work great for 10 items, but would be useless if there ended up being 10,000 of those items in the system. So we built some UI controls that would adapt to data volumes...say you had content type x and there were only 10 of the items in the system, you'd ideally want to present it with a set of radio buttons (assuming select one requirement)....more than 10 but <50, popup/overlay with all items listed alphabetically on a single page for quick selection, 10,000 and you're going to need some type of navigator or set of filter controls. P.S. Don't confuse this with some other previous Vignette products which have a pretty poor UI, this CMS was specifically created with a new UI from the ground up for that reason.
- eitland 16y agoElement Fusion, especialy lightcms (http://www.lightcms.com/ http://www.lightcms.com/). Hosted, no worries. Easy to use.
- chopsueyar 16y agoIs Django off the mark here?
- lovskogen 16y agoYeah.
- chopsueyar 16y agoWhy?
- Athtar 16y agoSounds like you are looking for something bigger/more capable than a WordPress type of CMS. In that case, try Umbraco. I have never used it myself but it looks very user-friendly: http://umbraco.org/help-and-support/video-tutorials/getting-started/what-is-umbraco http://umbraco.org/help-and-support/video-tutorials/getting-...
- lovskogen 16y agoIt is way to tech centric in terms of updating info and creating. Boxy admin interface. Sorry.
- Sizlak 16y agoDjango isn't a CMS, but it's a framework that seems designed to build CMSs. I'd much rather build a CMS from scratch in Django than try to bend Drupal to my will.
- lovskogen 16y agoI wouldn't bend Drupal in any way. You're suggesting there is no modern CMS , and I should build it?
- FraaJad 16y agoPlone. Obsessively focussed on being user friendly. http://plone.org/products/plone/features/ http://plone.org/products/plone/features/ There are many features that are part of core plone, that many other CMSes do not even think exist in a CMS. Anybody suggesting Wordpress as a CMS obviously did not read your requirement for "most modern in terms of ...user experience". If you hear negative comments about Plone, it is usually from developers who don't actually use the product or opining based on hearsay.
- knieveltech 16y agoTechnically I'm not convinced Wordpress is qualified for the term CMS, or at least no more qualified than say PHPbb, Gallery 2, or any other installable purpose built web application with a limited feature scope. Apparently there where sufficient individuals who disagree with this view for Wordpress to win CMS of the Year for 2010.
- techtalsky 16y agoI'm hoping you mean hearsay.
- mark_l_watson 16y agoI second the recommendation for Plone. I helped a friend set up Plone for a charity about 5 years ago, and it was really nice to work with and extend. Also about 3 years ago, we used it for technical documents on a customer project.
- lovskogen 16y ago
- Ueland 16y agoEdit from my side(since for some stupid reason did not explain why i prefer Wordpress): I have experience from CMS`es ranging from enterprise solutions to all round platforms like Wordpress, my brief opinion about some of them: 1) Polopoly: A enterprise solution typically used for magazine/news sites. The problem (with many enterprise solutions) is that it is very advanced and not easy to use at all for new users. I would almost say that training is a must for such a solution. I feel pretty sure that with better usability in focus, it could have been almost a killer app for larger sites. 2) EZ: Taken from the name, EZ should be easy to use, it`s not. This is just another solution fallen into the "Enterprise" trap, instead of focusing on the users that actually have to work with it, they focus on the bosses and persons with the money, in order to sell in the system. The solution itself is relatively plain but you can not simply log in a place and select "new article", instead it is typically creating objects here and there. 3) Wordpress: Finally a system that has the user in focus, the system is designed for people NOT being geeks. Anybody will without any training be able to login and create some content. It is plain and simple but in the same time it gives the user the needed information and not everything else. There is a good reason Microsoft has decided to close their blogging services and rather move all their users over to Wordpress. So to conclude: I put Wordpress on first place, with the possibility of Polopoly going to first place for larger solutions if they could get their user interface in order. * I guess some of you would say that Wordpress is not a CMS,in that case i do wonder... What is the difference between Wordpress and a "real" CMS? :)
- lovskogen 16y agoWordpress moves editing to a place away from your site. A non techie might be confused on what content he is editing, and where it is. I don't see Wordpress as a modern CMS because this kind of editing has been done in the last 20 years. I'll look into the ux of Polopoly, thanks. Edit: had a really hard time getting info out of the PP website, could you show me some screenshots?
- jordanlev 16y agoDefinitely check out concrete5 (http://concrete5.org http://concrete5.org). As others have mentioned, different systems are better for different situations, but if you're talking about easy to use by non-tech people to manage an informational website, I have found Concrete5 to be better than the rest by leaps and bounds. The reason it works well for these kinds of sites is that it aligns with non-technical users' mental model of their website. Non-tech users don't think of their site as a template that displays content from a database, but rather as a bunch of pages with stuff on the pages. Most CMS's require users to go to an administrative back-end which shows a hierarchical sitemap of pages -- an abstract representation of their site -- and this is VERY confusing to most people. Concrete5, on the other hand, is based on the concept of content blocks on a page. So to edit a page, you GO to the page and add/edit blocks of content there. The blocks thing is great because it allows for different "mini-UI's" for different kinds of content. For example, to edit regular text, a standard WYSIWYG editor works fine, but if you want to add an image or a youtube video or a navigation list or a google map, it doesn't work as gracefully -- the block system means that different kinds of content can get different editing UI's specifically tailored for that type of content (for example, a youtube video just gets a textbox to paste in the URL, or a google map block presents fields for addresses, marker options, etc.). There are many web-based CMS's that utilize this approach -- Weebly (a YC company), WebVanta, SnapPages, Yola, etc. -- but I haven't come across an open-source install-yourself CMS other than Concrete5 which works this way.
- bergie 16y agoTwo things I wouldn't want to see in a modern CMS: - IDE-like administeation UI with fifty buttons in the toolbar - Forms for content editing
- lovskogen 16y agoTotally agree!
- notahacker 16y agoLast time I looked at it (about a year ago) ModX struck a nice balance between extensibility and administrative power, designer/developer friendliness and simple in-page edits for content editors. You'd probably need someone with some degree of technical competence to get it started though.
- lovskogen 16y agoI'll check it out in the morning. Thank you for your feedback.
- RoyG 16y agoHaving hacked my way through Joomla, I think the answer to your question would be a wrapper that hides the CMS.
- lovskogen 16y agoWhat kind of wrapper?
- agarfors 16y agoApostrophe Now is modern, and their homepage describing it is modern as well: A screencast. Not like certain others expecting you to look elsewhere to be shown how it looks like. http://www.apostrophenow.com/ http://www.apostrophenow.com/ Won't mention techy stuff like the framework it's built on, (Symfony).
- lovskogen 16y agoLooks good, but basic - wonder how it handles more custom 'modules'.