JaySmall.com/old

No one told me this was Top 5 List Week. I spotted another useful list in Webland, this time, the five hidden costs of content management systems over at Vitamin.

In a nutshell:

1. The cost of training
2. The cost of quality
3. The cost of functionality
4. The cost of redundancy and flexibility
5. The cost of commitment

In my experience, over the years training costs on modern CMS have dropped, but costs of commitment -- which I will extend to include costs associated with keeping internal customers happy -- keep growing no matter how good, or new, the system.

Site teams in my day job at Scripps all use the Ellington CMS, which we have extended greatly using the Django framework. The systems offer sophisticated public-facing features and relatively simple administrative tools and methods.

Likewise, SI blog friends know my fondness for Drupal, which is both CMS and application framework. It, too, offers an elegant front end and easy back end.

In both cases, though the systems are quite flexible, site executives and administrators must commit to certain ways of doing things: process and workflow changes, specific template and programming languages, and core feature sets that may not exactly match every site's requirements. The Vitamin article discusses the likelihood of this mismatch as part of the costs of functionality and redundancy. But it also contributes to the costs of commitment, because complex organizations must continually convince themselves they have the right systems, and maintain an upgrade or extension path that satisfies all stakeholders.