Lindblom Media

Every publishing company with an online presence (and what publishing company doesn't have at least a minimal online presence?) requires some sort of content management system (CMS). CMS is software that uses a database to keep track of every bit of data on a business' website. CMS are also used to create, edit, repurpose, and search the website's content.

These systems are often called Web CMSs to distinguish them from enterprise CMS, which are systems that manage an organization's internal content. (A popular example of an open source enterprise CMS is Alfresco, which is available in both free and subscription versions.)

Small publishers have a wide variety of CMS applications to choose from, both open source and proprietary. This website focuses on open source CMS, since small and start-up publishers are less likely to afford license fees of commercial programs. However, if you decide to go with a proprietary CMS, a quick web search will identify plenty of companies willing to take your money. For instance, this Wikipedia page provides a list (though by no means exhaustive)of available CMS offerings.

Another valuable resource for comparing CMS applications is www.cmsmatrix.org.

Looking at both of these sites, it's clear that there are lots of commercial CMS in the field, but there are also plenty of open source CMS applications around. The following table, created from data collected at www.cmsmatrix.org, provides a side-by-side comparison of four of the most popular OS CMS: Drupal, Joomla, Plone, and Typo3.

Reviewing this table, it becomes clear that many of these systems are more similar than they are different. The article Comparing Open Source CMSes: Joomla, Drupal and Plone provides a helpful list of similarities:

1. Designers can develop structure and navigation for websites.
   
2. Non-technical editors can create and edit content, create new pages, and alter menus.
   
3. Designers can completely reconfigure the "look" of a page, so that the end users could never identify which CMS is being used.
   
4. Designers have access to features similar to those of enterprise CMS applications, in that they can establish internal work flows that enable users to share documents while also designating which user can edit which document.
   
5. They are adapted for search engine optimization (SEO).
   
6. Large user/designer communities provide many plug-ins that improve the CMS functionality. In the case popular programs, these communities also answer questions and develop updates fairly quickly
   
7. Programmers can work with the code so that the it works well with the unique needs of any organization.

While these program are good, publishers may require a bit from their CMS than the above generic features. As e-books and the slicing-and-dicing of XML-enabled content become standard in the industry, a publisher's CMS will need to be able to delivery this new content, customize content packages for individual customers, provide meaty RSS feeds, and do a countless host of other tasks. That's asking a lot, and in my research I didn't find anything with quite that much power.

A couple of commercial products are making strides in this direction (Libre Digital and Tizra). And given the pace of change, can it be very long before powerful open source options spring up? Developers are introducing and improving modules and plug-in all of the time, and it's only a matter of time before development catches up with this commercial software.

For some this wait and uncertainty may be frustrating, but for others it will look like an exciting opportunity to taking an active role in developing these new powerful platforms. Personally, I find it exciting.