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CMS Recommendations

How to provide community support for churches, Quaker meetings and clubs

5.0 Recommendations

5.1 Summary

• Most of the Open Source Systems (Section 2 above) are good on community support, although not very user friendly and poor on content management.
• Most of the Proper CMS systems (Section 3 above) could probably do the Content Management bit (to be confirmed through further investigation), but are short on integrated Discussion Groups (and by implication, other modules that would want to share the same user database).
• Most of the Other Commercial Suppliers (Section 5 above) would be too expensive for BYM.

5.2 Interim short list of five (Revised December 2003)

The following is a suggested unofficial short list, in no particular order and subject to more formal comparisons on the basis of agreed outline requirements and criteria, eg as suggested in the companion paper BYM Website Strategy.

[Note, there are other promising low end commercial systems that I have not yet digested - coming on!. JW]

5.2.1 HardCore Web Content Management

The closest to an integrated package seems to be HardCore Web CM, which is commercial but reasonably priced. It might be worth spending £100 for a Personal licence for evaluation purposes, prior to committing to the Pro Version at £1,000, plus more for the "Community Add-on" modules. But that is all still reasonable.

5.2.2 Membergate

Has all we want out of the box, and promises much less set up and admin costs (staff time or consultancy costs).

5.2.3 Plone and Zope

Still in there, but a steep learning curve?

5.2.4 Simon Gray's System

As further developed?

5.2.5 Mambo

Does most things, except full multi-site support. Worth trying?

5.3 Process Recommendations

A CMS project is not primarily about the technology. It is primarily about the content, what it is, who owns it, does it need weeding, who needs access to it, why, what purpose does it serve etc etc. It is also a change management project, requiring heavy user involvement.

This is not to advocate a "Waterfall" approach with written formal requirements in great detail rather than "prototyping". I am all in favour of prototyping as a development method, but after and with user interviews and workshops.

It is also recommended that any CMS implementation for BYM is be managed as a formal project, with defined objectives, scope, deliverables and a multi-disciplinary team including user representatives.

 John Wragg

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