March 26, 2009

Rebuttal to "Top CMS and Social Media Platform" article comments on Foliomag.com

I was recently interviewed by Matt Kinsman of Red7Media on the state of Web content management systems and what small publishers should be thinking about when implementing a new solution (if they are able to fund it at this point).

 There was some stimulating dissent on that page, and since the commenting module appears not to work on that site, I took the liberty of posting my rebuttal here. Will get my comment up on that site as soon as they chase out the issue.

@ScottPaley: Scott, DPCI does implement Drupal solutions, but we also implement Joomla, Day Communique, SharePoint and other solutions. We have also been asked to do formal procurement sessions for companies looking at a wide range of products. In my view, Drupal is the best fit for the financial strictures of small publishers. If I retired tomorrow, I'd still say the same. Since you are affiliated with The Plone Foundation, does that mean your opinion on top CMS should be taken with a grain of salt? I'd listen carefully, but mostly because you are a fellow Brown grad (as well as someone that has interesting opinions I'd want to hear).

@Jon (last name): I don't mind being disagreed with, but if you're going to make fun of my last name as well as attack me, you should think about using your own last name and your affiliation. Making blanket statements like Kickapps and Lithium are jokes is easy to do when you're anonymous. How about identifying yourself so we can get down to it? WRT those two products, I don't resell them, I have no financial interest in either product. I have noticed that a number of small publishers in the past 6-9 months want to get community sites up rapidly and they're going this route. This is a short cut. I AGREE with you that ceding already-small ad revenues is shortsighted if you can't pay the monthly hosting costs of those two solutions. However, for a quick fix (which is what some of these companies are trying to do), if you've got the monthly fee (ranging around a few thousand dollars) and if you pay attention to the legal agreement you sign to ensure you retain ownership of all content on that community site, you can migrate away once (if) you implement your own platform.

My pick would be Drupal Organic Groups module, but as you say, there are other open-source solutions out there that people should explore. By the way, that customer for which we integrated Lithium, we actually helped them port away data from that solution to an in-house community solution that they implemented. Was a pretty straightforward migration, minimal if any technical issues.

@DanRomanchik, I like what you have to say -- I was a little skittish about participating in this article since I knew that a 'top-3' for either was going to look like this was the short-list. Picking any software platform should ALWAYS be preceded by careful requirements analysis, along with looking at what kind of technologies you can support, what your infrastructure can bear, and what kind of vendor and support team you need.

I like what you wrote about strategy, maintenance and support.

With regard to this article, I never said in the interview that these solutions would be cheap or cost only thousands. If anyone has just a few thousand to spend, they'll go to a SaaS model solution like Clickability (again, I have no business affiliation with that company either, @Scott).

For a more customized implementation of Drupal (or Joomla or Plone, etc), those solutions can cost in the tens of thousands for the technical implementation alone.

In comparing that to the hundreds of thousands of dollars companies have spent in the past on proprietary CMS platforms, that is RELATIVELY inexpensive.

Posted at 10:04 pm by Joseph Bachana

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