Sorry that it's taken me so long to check this site! I'll send an email to let you know the info is here.

In the meantime, I've finished the draft of my PhD dissertation, which is specifically on CMS - if you like, I can share this draft. Anyone who is interested can email me at tekelse[at]gmail[dot]com - and if you think people might be interested, I could post it on this site.

Try taking a look at the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_management_system

You might also be interested to read an article on IBM Developerworks on "sustainable Web sites", which has some additional links and information at the end of the article. It provides some visual explanations and invites readers to try creating a Web site for their local communities: http://tinyurl.com/ibmlocal

Invitation: If you have found this site or article to be helpful, please make a post on Facebook or LinkedIn about it. Right now.

Social Networking: Please feel free to add me as a contact on LinkedIn or Facebook. If you want to learn more about Facebook, LinkedIn or any other social media site, please consider exploring the book Social Networking Spaces - all author proceeds go to CFTW, to support this and other sites - Amazon URL: http://tinyurl.com/snspacesbook

There is also a free sample edition available at: http://tinyurl.com/snspaces-sed

Giving back: If you are interested in writing an article for CMSEDU or submitting information, please contact tekelsey [at] gmail [dot] com

http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/02/23/content-management-systems-just-dont-work/

My own thoughts: I think there's some very helpful balanced thought in the commentary that follows the article, and I agree with what I read of it. I think the author has some valid points they are raising, but they seem to be ignoring the significant value that open source CMS can bring to individuals and non-profits who can't afford to hire a developer for custom application development, or even to manually create and maintain a Web site.

Here's some additional thoughts from an email I sent to the friend who sent the article link to me:

Hello,

I think it's a very interesting article, and a very useful set of discussion commentary. Taken alone, the article seems to be pretty biased, and seems to ignore the significant number of organizations and individuals who don't have technical experience, who can benefit from open source CMS. But when you take the article and add the commentary, then it seems balanced - raising the reasonable question of defining what a site can/can't do, and not necessarily expecting an open source CMS to do that. Like a good reminder of starting with the requirements of a site, and doing a cost/benefits analysis.

One unspoken response is that in spite of the commentary of this (presumably) credible individual, recovery.gov was in fact launched on Drupal, which does say something. The Obama team has been on the forefront of technology and are by no means being "taken in" by anything. And I think that the anecdotal claims (such as "most people hate their CMS") should be considered but also taken with a grain of salt. The balanced discussion would include whoever actually developed recovery.gov.

I'm cc'ing a few pals because I think they might possibly be interested in the article.

Regards,

-Todd

It's a study I was introduced to in graduate school a few years ago, which asked 2500 people to report on what affected their perceptions of the credibility of a Web site, and there are some interesting insights.

An excerpt from the Consumer Webwatch site:

"The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes."

RESOURCES:

One of the participants, Consumer Webwatch, has a page where it can be downloaded:

http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/dynamic/web-credibility-reports-evaluate-abstract.cfm

The Stanford "official" site: http://credibility.stanford.edu/publications.html