Content Management Solutions - The Pros and Cons
Tags: cms, dotnetnuke, drupal, joomla, web standards, wordpress
Choosing a content management system for your website makes commercial sense; you can update the website yourself, add new pages, delete pages, and basically take the website in the direction you want, without having to call your web designer and ask for the updates to be made. Like writing a letter, you get lots of goes at it until you are 100% happy with it, whereas with a traditional website, your copy has to be right when you pass it to your web designer as you’ll be paying to update it later on.
Inevitably however, it can result in compromise from a design perspective. One of my favourite CMSs is Dotnetnuke; it does just about everything, includes lots of modules the functionality of which would cost £000’s to develop on a bespoke basis. It supports multiple websites, has an easy to understand interface for end users, and is very simple to skin (style).
The problem comes when you try and create a standards compliant website with Dotnetnuke. Most skins you might buy are not CSS designs, many rely on tables for their structure. The core application itself, can be tweaked to be compliant, if you change doc types, take out the SolpartMenu, and use a CSS menu, Skin and Container suite, but what is the point when you go and install a 3rd party module that has all the functionality your client needs, but has not been developed with any attention to web standards - all the effort is wasted.
Fortunately, the many advantages of Dotnetnuke for me, outweigh the cons, and its’s progressing towards being standards compliant with each release, and like I said, by developing your own CSS skin and containers like we do, and modifying Dotnetnuke it is possible to make it compliant - but it takes time, and adds complications when upgrading.
The problem isn’t just with Dotnetnuke, though other CMS systems like Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress are standards compliant out the box, adding the wrong module can invalidate your website just the same. Though for most applications the core modules will be adequate so this shouldn’t be an issue. But these CMSs don’t have the same functionality Dotnetnuke does, in particular the ability to run multiple websites from what is effectively a single website. On the flip side you don’t need expensive windows Server and MS SQL Server to run Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress.
And as for standards, where possible we always build our websites to web standards, but function should come before form; having your website do what you need is more important than the fact that it won’t valid as XHTML Strict, because there are 3 code errors, and lets face it there are still plenty of websites that serve their users well, that don’t follow standards at all!
September 15th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
I find it very surprising that you would choose DNN over Drupal or Joomla. I can see maybe over Drupal just because Drupal is more geared towards developers, but Joomla is similar to DotNetNuke and seems like a way better alternative.
DotNetNuke was created with some weird idea that people could write super crappy modules and charge people for them ala SnowCovered. I spent a couple of years (maybe less than two) developing websites in this model and soon found it to be extremely frustrating.
I switched over to using Drupal; it did have a high ramp-up cost, but my productivity was booming after doing about 3 sites with it.
So my thought on this topic is this:
If you’re creating a blog, use Wordpress.
If you’re creating a social/community site, use Drupal.
If you’re creating a corporate site, use Joomla.
If you’re creating an intranet for a Microsoft-based-shop, use DotNetNuke.
September 15th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
some designerds (or resellers) can only use CMS for their websites as they dont know how to make a website. im not a fan of this method
September 15th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Eric - thanks for your reply, I’ll be taking a closer look at Joomla soon. Had a look at Drupal - as you say geared towards developers - which is great - but the point of a CMS is that you hand it off to the end user as you know. DNN, in my experience, is very easy for the end user to understand.