For all the hubbub in the higher education world about content management systems, the fact is that a CMS doesn't have to be complicated.
A content management system shouldn’t tell you how to build or organize your Web site; it should emphasize ease of use for unskilled users, and flexibility and open architecture for Web and IT staff. And it shouldn't be the only way to edit your Web site— you're likely to have users with considerable expertise in other perfectly acceptable authoring environments, and those folks shouldn't have to learn a new system if it's not necessary.
In our years building and developing Web sites and data applications, we’ve come into contact with most commercial CMS systems, and we’ve learned that few if any commercial systems meet these criteria; most are overbuilt, constructed on closed, proprietary foundations, and stuffed with features that most users will never take advantage of. And open-source solutions often take months to adopt, train, customize and roll out.
Because the management of content using a standardized tool is a very real need for many of our clients— and because no CMS that we’ve seen can meet our needs of simplicity, flexibility, easy adoptability, and standards compliance—we’ve built a CMS tool ourselves, with static page content editing integrated into a general set of dynamic content management applications. Our CMS is called LiveWhale.
You can learn more about LiveWhale at livewhale.com. For a whitepaper about LiveWhale, or to sign up for a free demo, e-mail livewhale@whitewhale.net.