Content Management: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A good portion of the last several years of my career has been focused around web content management using SDL Tridion. I have to admit that I like Tridion, overall, though there are a number of things I'd change if it were up to me. At the same time, Tridion is a very high-end web CMS - it's expensive, and the learning-curve for it is very steep, to say the least.

I've looked around at other (free and commercial) content-management solutions, and while many of them have a lot to offer, there weren't any that I really liked that I could afford for my own uses, so I added building my own web CMS tool to my list of projects, figuring I'd use or adapt concepts and practices that I liked, discard the ones that I thought were of little or no use, or that felt problematic, and see what I could come up with.

The list of CMS' that I looked over included:

• BrightSpot (a proprietary CMS that I encountered at work)
• Django (a Python application)
• Drupal
• Joomla
• SiteCore
• Tridion
• Wordpress

There are a whole slew of web CMS applications out in the wild, though - too many to evaluate all of them and still have time to actually do anything fun or useful on my own.