The CMS Myth

The best 25 tweets from Jboye 2012 Philadelphia

Jeff Cram — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:40:45 +0000

I thoroughly enjoyed the JBoye event in Philadelphia this year. It stands out for its intimacy and genuine peer networking around the topics of digital strategy, user experience and content management. Very few folks are there to sell you anything. A refreshing change from the conference circuit.

Given that JBoye runs four tracks at once, I found myself keeping a constant eye on the back channel tweet stream to see what I was missing. Here’s my top 25 favoriate tweets from the event curated with Storify. Apologies if I left out any of your gems. There was a lot of good stuff to choose from.

The Future of CMS is in Delivery: Deane Barker at JBoye12

Jeff Cram — Thu, 10 May 2012 21:17:16 +0000

Deane Barker is one of my favorite folks in web content management industry. Always insightful, and truly committed to the craft of CMS.

He’s also got a blog post for everything. It’s become somewhat of a running joke between us, but seriously, try writing something about CMS and chances are he’s covered something related on his prolific Gadgetopia blog.

He just gave a whirlwind presentation at Jboye12 that made the case for the future of CMS shifting from management to delivery.

Here’s the premise:

Content Management is a solved problem. We’re rapidly entering the post management era.

“The dividing line is the point of publish” he says. “The management side is all the really boring stuff like workflow and access. The content delivery is the really interesting stuff.”

He sees the following areas under the umbrella of delivery:

Campaign measurement
User generated content
Multi-channel delivery
A/B testing
Visitor segmentation

In the spirit of a Philadelphia-based talk, he compares the function of content management to the training regime in the Rocky movie. Delivery is when you actually take it to the ring, he says.

He did an informal survey of seven CTOs of CMS vendors and found they all unanimously agreed (7-0) that their product-roadmap focus is on delivery and they aren’t spending much time (if any) evolving the repositories and management unless there are new delivery functions that demand it.

It was hard to disagree with anything Deane said. There’s been a massive shift toward content delivery capabilities and an explosion of point solutions competing for mindshare with traditional CMS vendors.

The next few years are going to be very interesting in seeing what bets CMS vendors make on the delivery side and whether their efforts are “good enough” to compete and win against best of breed solutions.

It was a great talk by Deane, and I’m also excited to be able to finally tell him that I have a blog post on that topic as well from way back in 2008. I believe that marked the start of this shift, and now four years later we’re actually seeing it play out in the marketplace.

What do you think: Is Content Management a solved problem?

Exploding Topic Pages

Jeff Cram — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:48:41 +0000

The JBoye event in Philadelphia is always one of my favorites. It’s a place where practitioners get together to talk about what’s really happening with digital strategy. An event short on schwag and vendor sales pitches and long on in-depth conversations and peer networking.

I just got out of a session on Exploding Topic Pages by Tim McGovern of the Heritage Foundation and David Hobbs of David Hobbs Consulting (presentation embedded below). I’m a sucker for anything with Explosion in the title.

The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank in Washington D.C. with 300 folks on staff focused on public policy research.

The Foundation embarked on a redesign in 2010 in tandem to a move to a new CMS. A key goal was to do a better job of curating top-level pages and get more granular with more specific topics.

Anyone that has managed large -scale content sites knows how important topic pages can be, and how hard they can be to manage in decentralized organizations.

Here’s where the explosion part comes in:

As part of the redesign process the foundation went from 71 to 920 topic pages as part of the redesign effort. Yes, 920 topic pages.

Tim’s challenge was to figure out if this was a good or bad thing.

His photo of a train wreck said it all.

They discovered the explosion of topic pages resulted in very uneven quality. They ended up with lots of orphan pages with inadequate content and sub par user experiences.

David Hobbs partnered with the Foundation to take them through a process to clean up the mess and get a better strategy put in place for managing the pages on an ongoing basis.

“There are different types of topic pages,” says David. “Some are news related and need to be put up very quickly, and some are more permanent.”

What I loved about their approach is the rigor and data behind the decision making process. Tim and David walked through a comprehensive assessment methodology that looked at both supply side and demand side metrics.

They found that the approach to validating a topic page came down to three core questions

• Has there been research published in the last six months?
• Is there greater than 10 content items for the topic?
• Have there been more than 10 page views in the last six months?

Here’s another gem from their process:

They gave each research director a data-driven scorecard to show them how their topic pages were performing and where they “were in the red.”

These dashboards provided the directors real-time information on the health of their topic pages and content, along with direct links to open up tickets to fix any issues around tagging or out of date content.

The end result of all this effort was to cull the topic pages down from those 900+ to around 150. They also have a much more engaged group of research directors that have actionable information about the performance of their content. It was a compelling case study and one I think a lot of organizations can learn from.

Here’s the presentation from Tim and David:

Exploding Topics Pages

View more presentations from David Hobbs Consulting

Revisiting WordPress as a CMS (Again)

John Eckman — Thu, 10 May 2012 10:48:50 +0000

We’ve address the issue of WordPress as a CMS before here at the Myth, and my own personal take on the issue should be quite clear: I am a WordPress plugin developer, technical reviewer of WordPress Books for Packt Press, and a coorganizer of WordCamp Boston (2010, 2011, and currently in planning on 2012). The CMS Myth itself runs on WordPress, as does johneckman.com.

I want to revisit WordPress as a CMS platform, at least briefly, based on on its “visible absence” at this week’s CMS Expo.

On the first day of CMS Expo I noticed that WordPress wasn’t one of the showcased CMS platforms despite the clear goal of having a (pardon the political expression) “big tent” approach and inviting a wide variety of platforms. Amanda Blum (my fellow lead organizer at WordCamp Boston 2010) noted there was a WordPress track a few years ago but that the audience wasn’t receptive (see tweet stream in storify form below).

Then, during Liz Strauss’s lunchtime keynote yesterday, she used the WordPress project, Matt Mullenweg as an entrepreneur, and Automattic as an example of a successful company built by and with a community of its users. She prefaced her comments with a line that said roughly:

I understand where WordPress sits in the spectrum of content management systems.

One of the attendees, Phil Sturgeon then tweeted:

“I understand where WordPress sits in the spectrum of content management systems.” That is a clever way to put it. #cmsexpo

I was tempted to respond, with something like: You mean at the top of the spectrum, as the most popular, and the one which powers nearly 15% of the world’s top sites, and 22% of active new sites in the US, significantly more than any other platform represented here?

But I didn’t. I’m not interested in starting yet-another this platform vs that platform twitter argument. I am interested in why there’s such a collective desire to exclude WordPress from discussion as a content management system, given that it clearly does manage content. I sometimes think people are more willing to accept “Dreamweaver and FTP” as a content management system than WordPress!

Now, I’m not saying WordPress is perfect for any and all CMS challenge. In fact, I’d argue no platform is equally well suited for any and all CMS challenge. (Mistaking platform selection for strategic planning is also a problem well known to the CMS Myth audience). But given that the audience at CMS Expo includes a wide range of users, from individual freelancers building sites for small businesses, churches, and non-profits to large agencies building complex sites for Enterprise clients, I’d have to say the total absence of the platform (and the occasional jabs in WordPress’s direction in the twitter stream and the hallway conversation) is starting to feel like some form of collective psychological resistance.

Here’s a curated Tweet Stream of some of the choice bits of the discussion – let us know what you think in the comments.

CMS Expo: Busting Web Experience Management Myths

John Eckman — Wed, 09 May 2012 21:13:58 +0000

Although there was fierce competition in the 2pm time spot, including Michael Silverman’s talk on Capturing Community (which I wanted to see), there was a decent crowd for the web experience management myth busting session.

Here are the top five myths:

WEM is a technology problem – or a problem best solved by applying the right technology
You need an “all in one” WEM platform”
CMS Platform makers understand your business
Site visitors have simple interests easily inferred from a small number of actions
Your business is ready and willing to listen to the voice of the customer

At the end of the day, web experience management is about taking seriously the role of the CMS in helping the business achieve its goals. Truly responsive designs don’t just respond to different devices, but track and evaluate their effectiveness at having an impact on the people who use those devices.

Slides follow – thanks to those who attended and tweeted!:

Web experience management myths

View more from John Eckman

CMSExpo: Killer Project Management Panel

Jake DiMare — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:08:47 +0000

Our CMS Mythbuster panel on tips and tricks for Killer Project Management at CMS Expo 2012 turned out to be a big hit. The panel was moderated by myself and included the following panelists:

The session was very well attended and nobody on the panel was skewered on the twitter back channel. To the contrary, there were some great virtual comments in addition to fantastic questions in the room during the session.

As the session unfolded the panel and audience narrowed in on a set of personality characteristics and activities a person should cultivate and prioritize if they would like to be a truly ‘killer’ project manager in the CMS business. For many, a killer project manager’s priorities are fairly well known and obvious but we should share them nonetheless:

Scope
Schedule
Budget
Expectations

These are the four things a project manager should be aware of and actively managing at all times. What is the scope of your project? Is your team building to scope? What’s the schedule? Are you one day ahead? Two days behind? Where are you on budget today? Are your clients expectations being met? Are their expectations reasonable and appropriate? Does your team know what’s expected of them to be successful?

A killer project manager should know the answer to these questions (and more) at all times. He or she should also know what the appropriate path is if the answer to any of these questions is not aligned with a successful outcome.

The other side of our discussion was focused on personality characteristics. Everyone in the room, whether they were a client side stakeholder, designer, engineer, project manager, or small business CEO, all agreed 100%: The most important characteristic of a killer project manager must be excellent COMMUNICATION skills.

Emma Jane shared some fantastic insight on knowing the various stakeholders within an organization as individuals. She suggested it is important to understand not only what their role is within the context of the team, but understand whether they are one of your cheerleaders or naysayers. To add to that, she pointed out the importance of knowing how to use both.

Towards the bottom of the hour another critical aspect of being an exceptional project manager emerged. Something that truly separates the Padwan from the Jedi (so to speak): Leadership. It’s sort of appropriate it took a while to get to this topic, although it would have been great to have more time to unpack such a loaded term. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to lead until you know where you are going and so covering the fundamentals was the right place to start.

However, once a project manager understands what is expected of them and the people on their team…And how to execute the steps in a project, what’s left is to make the project the best possible experience it can be for everyone involved with positive energy, confidence and compassion.

CMS Expo – Babe in the Big City (or, babe in a sea of dev dudes)

Katie Del Angel — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:00:31 +0000

I had an interesting exchange with fellow content strategist and CMS Expo veteran, David Skarjune (@skarjune), on the way up to the post-lunch sessions: As I mentioned my upcoming Confab cameo, he pointed out that I will probably be in much more familiar company there. As in, 2:1 ratio of females to men, as opposed to the obviously imbalanced attendance here at CMS Expo.

This is not a new feeling. I’ve noticed similar gender discrepancies at user group meet ups and conferences of other CMS in Boston. Perhaps I brushed it off as yet another incongruence of New England’s tech scene. But alas, here I am in the Midwest, and still surrounded by dev dudes.

This is not to bash the men. They clearly know what they are talking about. But wouldn’t it be brilliant to see ladies like Kristina Halvorson (@halvorson) and Emma Jane Hogbin (@emmajanedotnet) and Liz Strauss (@lizstrauss) on the agenda for something more than the blatant marketing angle it provides?

As a newbie to the content strategy space, I hope to see conferences open up the scope of speaker recruitment beyond the sponsor Rolodexes, and truly acknowledge the spectrum of knowledge the ladies have to offer.

The Fog of CMS

John Eckman — Wed, 09 May 2012 03:16:39 +0000

Just a quick observation from CMS Expo.

At one point during the morning’s Founder’s Panel, the CMS providers were offered the chance to ask the audience questions, turning the tables on the usual panel approach. One of the vendors (I honestly can’t remember which) asked how many folks in the audience were planning to move their sites into the cloud.

Very few hands went up.

Does this suggest that the cloud is just another technology solution in search of a problem? Does it suggest the audience at CMS Expo isn’t “enterprise-y” enough to need utility computing, flexible scaling, and the kind of optimization cloud computing can provide?

Maybe it just means that asking people in a large crowd to raise their hands is virtually certain to result in underwhelming response, especially early in the morning when they’ve been travelling and after a few hours of discussion.

Whatever it means, it seems clear to me that the benefits of the cloud have so far been most realized by those who most suffered under the old dedicated hardware model. The further you are from the pager that beeps when the site is down, the less you care about where or on what your sites are hosted: cloud, fog, or big iron.

CMSExpo Day One: We’re Gonna Need More Tables

John Eckman — Wed, 09 May 2012 02:56:05 +0000

CMS Expo Founder's Panel

CMS Expo 2012 kicked off this morning with a CMS Founder’s panel so big they had to bring in extra tables. No wonder people new to the field are so confused and overwhelmed! (I also couldn’t get all the participants in one shot – the above is two photos stitched together, and even then it leaves out Movable Type whose representative joined late).

Participants (and CMS’s) represented included (from right to left):

Brian Kim from Liferay
Shaun Walker from Dot Net Nuke
Michael Uzquiano from Cloud CMS
Ryan Thrash from MODX CMS
Sean Schroeder from Blue River / Mura CMS
Phil Sturgeon from PyroCMS
Kieran Lal from Acquia / Drupal
Paul Orwig from Open Source Matters (Joomla!)
Benni Mack from Typo 3
Christopher Park from Telerik Sitefinity
Geoff Nicol from Perforce Chronicle
Christopher Carter from Wondercode
Kat Liendgens from Hannon Hill
Sultan Ghahtani from Sitecore
Nob Seki (not pictured) from Six Apart / Movable Type

It was interesting to see the diversity of the panel: Java, PHP, C#, and CFML; proprietary and open source, relative newcomers and long-standing players. The only real contentious portion of the panel was Kieran Lal calling out Sitecore’s “The Siren Song of Open Source” whitepaper for propagating fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about open source. (Here’s the whitepaper and the response from Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert).

At one point while trying to livetweet the early part of the panel I realized it might just be easier to list who was NOT at CMS Expo:

Who else would you expect to see, who is #notatcmsx? Leave a comment below or tweet to @cmsmyth with hashtag #notatcmsx and let us know. Keep following @jeckman @jakedimare @cmsmyth and @katiedel for more tweets from #cmsx.

CMS Expo: One Big Web Content Management Jamboree

Katie Del Angel — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:42:31 +0000

In just a few short weeks, I’ll be jumping on the Mythbuster bandwagon with John Eckman and Jake DiMare to head to the Windy City for the CMS Expo. As a relative newbie to the content strategy and CMS circuit, I had a couple questions for the Expo’s main man, John Coonen. When he wasn’t busy crashing the Expo website, John had a lot to share about the event.

Let’s start with the easy stuff – this will be my first ever CMS Expo. What makes the Expo different from other CMS or content strategy conferences?

We’re ridiculously different, honestly. You’ll have to come to find out first-hand, but suffice it to say, it’s like going to a football game where you’re on the field with players, in the game! There’s no stadium seating here. It’s an intimate gathering of about 350-400 of many of the world’s sharpest minds in business, technology and creativity, all under one roof.

It’s a conference I’d pay for, if I were a conference-goer today. I love people, love entrepreneurial spirit, I’m intrigued by technology but despise the advertorial style of today’s conferences. They’ve become a waste of time for attendees. So, following one of my own self-imposed business rules, I decided a few years back that rather than complain, I’d shut up and create something better.

Sounds like you’ve got a lot to say about the “other conferences”! So how exactly is CMS Expo making the situation better?

Well, CMS is inherently collaborative, right? So why aren’t we *learning* about content – how we manage it, strategize, market and sell with content – as a collaborative team? There are developer conferences, and six months later, there’s a business conference. Well, by then, a lot of the information learned is stale and useless, and there’s a huge opportunity lost for the Content Team to build a more cohesive, energizing bond – that only a “retreat” atmosphere like CMS Expo can foster.

Content teams work together, so why not learn together? It’s great to see different members huddle up before and after sessions to share what they found out. It sure brings clarity to the decision-making process when everyone’s singing from the same sheet of music. That’s why we have something for all members of the Content Team, at all skill levels. Everything we offer at CMS Expo – including our business mixers – is focused on empowering all participants with relevant, timely, useful, actionable information, that people can digest and apply immediately to their business. It’s not only unique, it’s awesome.

How have you seem the conference grow over the past 5 years? How will this year be different?

Growth has been huge. We started with one CMS and Two Tracks (Business & Technical), doing 14 sessions. We now have steadily grown to 15 CMSs, 7 concurrent “tracks,” and over 100 learning sessions. We’ve added a full day of CMS Comparison Panels too, as people want to know which CMS is best for their business, be that small business or corporate, non-profit, education or government. We’ve got all that, and more. Pretty sweet.

Let’s talk numbers – how many are registered? What’s the breakdown of developers, designers, other? How many speakers and sessions?

We expect 350 to 400 attendees. We’re very close to that number right now, and depending on your Klout score at CMS Critic, we expect to sell out shortly after this article hits the web. The breakdown is about half are Businesspeople / marketers, owners and managers; 1/4 Designers, 1/4 Developers. Most of the Developers are actually Speakers. We have 80 speakers slotted for just over 100 sessions (learning sessions, comparison panels, moderated panels, etc).

So this year will feature the first-ever CMS Community Summit. What kind of things do you expect to hear from the attendees? (Based on the responses we got with the CMS Wisdom Report, people have got a lot to say!)

Wow, I hadn’t read the CMS Wisdom Report. Clever! I will read it after I answer your question, so I can compare notes…We will be polling attendees ahead of time, to get more details and make the CMS Summit more productive for everyone. Directionally, I suspect the CMS Summit will revolve around a few primary issues: 1) Usability for creatives and non-developers 2) Social Content Management, how / when / why to integrate social content with “conventional” content types; and 3) Debunking and mythbusting “CXM, WXM” and other various acronyms and such, separating fact from fiction. What’s important, and what’s hype?

Do you anticipate any surprises to come from the Summit (from the attendees or the vendors)?

The Community Summit is by nature a surprise, and we welcome them. The format itself is unique. For an hour or so, after holding our Founder’s Panel in the Main Hall, in which attendees get to ask questions of the CMS Founders and Executives, we’ll turn the tables, shining the spotlight on attendees, and give the CMS leaders a chance to ask questions of the audience. That should keep it interesting!

One of the best ways to learn is to be engaged in the discussion (“in the game,” as I mentioned before). The Community Summit gives everyone a chance to interact with the CMS leaders, and cooperatively identify challenges and possible solutions. I suspect that many of the Founders and leaders will ask some very interesting questions, and we’ll witness some very intriguing and engaging answers as well from the attendees.

The great part of being in technology is that each and every minute is likely to bring another interesting and useful surprise.

Another major part of the show, the CMSA, is in its 5^th year – tell us about that. How many, what categories?

The CMSA Spotlight Awards recognize the best CMS Sites, and best CMS Apps (extensions, modules, etc), best Developers and best Designers in the industry. Awards will be presented at CMS Expo live. It’s way better than the Oscars too, because while it’s good content, it’s over in an hour.

Awesome — I’m pumped! Thanks, John. I’m very much looking forward to the conference — let’s hope it’s all it’s cracked up to be!

You can follow the CMS Mythbusters, John and Jake, and me, as we live-blog and tweet our way through the week. OR, if that’s not enough, you can still register for the Expo yourself. John’s even got himself a discount code, if you’d like.