30 July 2010
Top 10 Mistakes When Selecting a CMS
This is an excellent introduction to the topic of selecting a CMS. Don't make the same mistakes that others have made - read James Robertson's article and learn from a recognised expert on content management.
Plugins for EPiServer
Looking for commercial, 3rd party or open source plug-ins for EPiServer?
Here's some starting points:
http://www.episerver.com/extras/
http://episerver.codeplex.com/
https://www.coderesort.com/p/epicode/wiki/WikiStart
Here's some starting points:
http://www.episerver.com/extras/
http://episerver.codeplex.com/
https://www.coderesort.com/p/epicode/wiki/WikiStart
EPiServer Composer Video
Pure eye-candy. Even if you're not a fan of EPiServer, you have to admit these guys know how to market their product!
29 July 2010
Website Migration Handbook
A colleague was doing a little 'Googling' recently on the topic of large scale website (CMS) migrations, and came up with a little nugget of wisdom. He was quick to acknowledge the danger of Googling, but in this case the results speak for themselves.
I read the Website Migration Handbook and was immediately impressed by the author's depth of experience, knowledge and wisdom, and his ability to explain the material is such a clear manner. It is so refreshing to hear the voice of someone who's been there on the ground doing the hard, often thankless task of content migration, as opposed to another consultant-type offering vague best practices, lacking in the hands-on advice that the people on the ground really need.
IMHO this handbook is destined to become one of those industry bible's - an absolute must read for those undertaking any sort of website migration.
I read the Website Migration Handbook and was immediately impressed by the author's depth of experience, knowledge and wisdom, and his ability to explain the material is such a clear manner. It is so refreshing to hear the voice of someone who's been there on the ground doing the hard, often thankless task of content migration, as opposed to another consultant-type offering vague best practices, lacking in the hands-on advice that the people on the ground really need.
IMHO this handbook is destined to become one of those industry bible's - an absolute must read for those undertaking any sort of website migration.
23 July 2010
Where's my spell checker?
While working on an EPiServer proposal for a client today, the client had a requirement that the CMS must have a spell checker built into the WYSIWYG editor. Fair enough. Feeling fairly certain that it would, I thought I'd just check that it supported multiple dictionaries. To my surprise, there was no spell check icon in the editor! For some reason it seems to have been removed by EPiServer when they integrated TinyMCE.
Thankfully, Ben Edwards has shown how to add the TinyMCE spell checker back in.
Thankfully, Ben Edwards has shown how to add the TinyMCE spell checker back in.
Community features on content pages
Today I was looking for a way to add some "community" centric features to standard content pages. As would be expected I'm not the first to make this request, and a bit of Googling soon came up with a gem from Per Hemmingson:
With a little bit of a tweak, EPiServer's Relate+ can empower your plain old content pages with community features. You can allow visitors to rate the content, comment on it, see most viewed & most popular pages. Refer Per Hemmingson's blog post.
With a little bit of a tweak, EPiServer's Relate+ can empower your plain old content pages with community features. You can allow visitors to rate the content, comment on it, see most viewed & most popular pages. Refer Per Hemmingson's blog post.
20 July 2010
What do you mean its not open source?
Thats right, EPiServer is not another open source CMS. Its closed source, commercial software. And in my opinion this has a lot to do with the success of EPiServer (9000+ web sites use EPiServer), in a market that is absolutely awash with free, open source content management systems, and literally thousands of (often) home grown web CMS's that have been cobbled together by well meaning, but typically under resourced web agencies, with little experience in designing scalable, maintainable, extensible, and not to mention quality software products.
The sheer number of CMS's out there in the market today is absolutely ridiculous. Most estimates put the number well over 2000, and that is likely to be on the low side as most of the home grown CMS's are not even advertised. Then you need to count in all the slightly modified open source CMS's that have been branched away from their original source code by modifications, leaving the poor web site owner with an orphaned product which cannot easily be updated to a newer version.
I'm all for consumer choice and variety, but maintaining so many near-identical products is just an enormous waste of human effort. Think how much better these products could be if just some of these fragmented development efforts were to unite, share their thoughts, and reduce duplicated effort. There is simply no way all these products and open source initiatives can continue to thrive. Consolidation is inevitable, and that means the end for the less successful CMS's out there.
Open source projects are not immune to failure - you'll hear more from me about this soon. I have nothing against open source software, in fact I think the movement has an emormous amount to offer society, I just happen to think that it is not a silver bullet for all scenarios, and that the apparent savings in license fees are all too often lost on development hours, or lack of availability of suitably experienced developers, lack of support, and delayed projects.
The sheer number of CMS's out there in the market today is absolutely ridiculous. Most estimates put the number well over 2000, and that is likely to be on the low side as most of the home grown CMS's are not even advertised. Then you need to count in all the slightly modified open source CMS's that have been branched away from their original source code by modifications, leaving the poor web site owner with an orphaned product which cannot easily be updated to a newer version.
I'm all for consumer choice and variety, but maintaining so many near-identical products is just an enormous waste of human effort. Think how much better these products could be if just some of these fragmented development efforts were to unite, share their thoughts, and reduce duplicated effort. There is simply no way all these products and open source initiatives can continue to thrive. Consolidation is inevitable, and that means the end for the less successful CMS's out there.
Open source projects are not immune to failure - you'll hear more from me about this soon. I have nothing against open source software, in fact I think the movement has an emormous amount to offer society, I just happen to think that it is not a silver bullet for all scenarios, and that the apparent savings in license fees are all too often lost on development hours, or lack of availability of suitably experienced developers, lack of support, and delayed projects.
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