At my new work, they use a CMS called Morello. I have to say I’m finding it quite annoying to work in, coming from a HomeSite etc. background where you can just edit code directly, rather than having to do it through some media surface software.
It’s rather slow too – as blogged about before, the computers at work are 5 year-old-laptops, with only 256MB RAM. This in itself makes me want to kill myself several times each day 
So, what we have is a resource-intensive CMS which is likely optimised for decent computers (not the shit that we use); a slow-as-fuck browser that doesn’t have tabs (so for each new page, I have to open an entire new window, which again takes ages – though on Wed I finally got Firefox… and immediately noticed that their old website has some embarrassing display errors in FF, i.e. where you can’t see crucial information) ; and a deadline for the website refresh of last Friday!
I’ll have to try and finish it today, as I do not want to have to battle with it again next week. I could have done this in 1-2 days, given a fast, modern computer, and the opportunity to change things directly, rather than having to understand the ‘relations’ between items, and searching for stuff within the badly organised content manager (which again takes ages due to low RAM). I guess CMS can be useful and speed thing up – especially, in organisations where people manage content but don’t have html knowledge. They’d still need proper training e.g. on Morello though, as it’s not very innovative or self-explanatory.
Luckily, I can pick things up really quickly, and don’t tend to need training for new software. Overall, it is a good new skill to be using CMS, even though I wouldn’t use it myself.
Filed under: Daily life, PC, Work | Tagged: CMS, content management system, morello, old computers
I think the idea of CMS is more or less good — provide an easy way to write websites. But there’s something even easier than CMS systems, and that’s a wiki. No fooling yourself with a WYSIWYG, which I’d rather correct and call WYSINRWYG — what you see is not really what you get — you write code instead, which you can quickly preview and save.
CMS systems have this separation: you edit stuff in one place (a panel or something like that), and you display it someplace else. A wiki doesn’t make this distinction: place where you browse/read and place where you edit, are the same, one place.
I actually use a CMS for most of my client’s websites, and you can just log in to the front of the site, click the page you want to edit, and edit the page, save it and poof – you are done. The page you look at is the one you edit. Best of all – no coding required, so pretty much anyone who can go online can edit the page – of course they would have to have the correct rights to do it.