Complicated Management Systems

For those of you who have been on Mars for the last several years, CMS (content management systems) are the backbone of dynamic content delivery on the web. They should be transparent to the user, but the workload of the administrator or developer is cut down significantly.

CMS has been played out. It has been played out in several ways actually. I’ve explored several of these packages and they all seem a little too complicated for the average user to utilize “out-of-the-box”. I don’t think the user should have to maintain content-specific templates. I don’t believe that a web designer should have to build thier website around a CMS, I think the CMS should be easy to integrate into any existing design. Content is content, a list of links shouldn’t be administered differently than a list of news items. Only the way it is presented changes, and this is accomplished with CSS (and some clever programming).

My idea for this is to break up dynamic content into elements that can be placed anywhere you want dynamic content to appear. Dynamic content should be like HTML, you place simple markup within your document to obtain the desired effect. No separate CMS style sheet, no separate templates, just a simple system that makes integrating dynamic content natural to web developers. Content delivery shouldn’t be limited to the blog/title/author/content paradigm. LiveList is the start of a bigger project; right now it only has the ability to group simple content and display it semantically. You can do several creative things with it as is, but soon I will be adding several new features to make it do all the things other content management systems can do.

I’m not trying to write a replacement for Wordpress or Textpattern or any other established CMS. They have covered the personal publishing idea quite extensively. What I want to do is make a content tool that will adapt to to any type of situation, whether it be corporate news updates, photoblogs, or just a simple sidebar without the bells and whistles. This is for the web developers who want to put dynamic content into thier clients site’s without turning it into a blog.

Obviously I’ve given myself quite the challenge, but I think it can be done. Unfortunately, there is a pretty good chance that it has already been done — I haven’t explored all the solutions available. In any case, I’ll have something to keep me busy in the cold, dark winter nights ahead.