Choosing a CMS
24th July 2005
We’re busy working with Invention Media get their .Wow web content management system (and more…) to near-as-darn-it AAA accessibility. Quite a big piece of work, involving a wholesale move from tables to CSS-based layout. We have been most impressed at the improvement in rendering speed of the pages, even on a fast machine - CSS wins hands down over table-based layout. We’re nearly there, now, and there are some interesting sites going up on .Wow over the coming months. More news as it comes in.
While up to our elbows in Coldfusion, we have been giving Content Management some idle thought. Good WCM can ensure a reasonable degree of accessibility, without a great deal of knowledge on the part of content providers (apart from a quick tutorial on alt text equivalence, perhaps).
It is very difficult, however, to find useful vendor-independent advice on selecting a CMS. A couple of interesting reports shed some murky light on the subject - a rather expensive CMS report from CMSWatch, and a free CMS report from Forrester-Wave. Oddly, neither report features with Broadvision… maybe broadvision never made it big in the states. Most of the usual suspects are in there though, Interwoven, Documentum and Stellent for you ECM fans, and Tridion, and FatWire both make good showings in the F-W report.