CMS evolution, publishing revolution?

Around this time five years ago I was evaluating the Content Management Systems (CMS) marketplace for silicon.com. We had spent several weeks looking at the main players in the market. They were big, expensive, monolithic products when you look back at them now, requiring a significant investment in licensing, hardware and consultancy to get them set up. We had just settled on a solution when the business was promptly acquired by CNET and the project shelved!

Looking back at those products today explains a lot about the current state of on-line publishing. The high cost of entry meant that smaller publishers just couldn't afford to get on-line in any meaningful way so they had a local developer build them a basic CMS to get them running. When confronted with multi-million pound proposals from the suppliers, most of the major publishers decided to build an in-house team to create their own systems from scratch.

The landscape today looks very different, the explosion of the blogging phenomena combined with the proliferation of open source applications and new technologies such as XML, RSS and AJAX mean that literally anybody can now publish on-line without needing to understand design, HTML or know how to build a CMS.

Architecturally, the blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger very effectively (although quite simply) separate the four main components of a CMS, content, categorisation, functionality and design as shown in the diagram below: -


You sign up, choose the presentation layer from a selection of styles, the platform providers create the functionality for you and provide you with the creation and categorisation tools so all you need to do is to create the content.

Mainstream content management systems are only now starting to provide similar flexibility for publishers. Open source products such as Drupal and Joomla now offer a viable way for smaller businesses to get on line effectively. Like the blogging platforms, they introduce the opportunity to create multiple sites, cost effectively, by re-using functionality, content and platforms. But how many publishers are actually taking advantage of this? Often, even where publishers have multiple sites, many are still designed and built in isolation from their stablemates as businesses fail to understand the benefits of one platform.

My favourite illustration of how this works is www.visitwales.com. It shows perfectly how this can be put into practice to create multiple, speciality sites from a single content management system.

The country sites all use the same content apart from the "Holiday Packages" and "Travelling to Wales" sections.

The foreign language versions use the same functionality as the rest of the sites but with local language translations of the content.

Finally, the activity based sites utilise all the same weather, accommodation, history content from the country sites and add specific editorial for that topic.

All the sites run on the same CMS and the editorial teams are not even aware that they are sharing a system.

The problem for all those publishers (large and small) that built their own systems is that they now have such a huge “cost of exit” that it's almost impossible to migrate to this model. The small publishers probably don’t even have access to their original developers (one story I heard recently was of a developer that emigrated to New Zealand to be a car mechanic!).

The large publishers are desperately trying to adapt/re-engineer their legacy systems for web 2.0 and don’t have the resources (or the will) to migrate to a new platform.

On the flip side, anybody deploying a CMS now has a multitude of cost effective options, especially if the requisite thinking in terms of scale is carried out. I’ve already talked about the retailers entering the content fray but those off-line publishers who originally held back, now have a great opportunity as do any new pure play on-line publishers. In the visitwales example above, the cost of adding, say a canoeing site, is simply the creation of the appropriate content and some design work. This is truly scalable content management.

There are many publishers in between the individual bloggers and the CNET/Reed/EMAP’s of the world who can now start to make inroads into the multitude of valuable niches too small to be of interest to the big boys. Finally it seems they have the tools to make this possible. The CMS evolution continues but the real on-line publishing revolution hasn’t even started yet…