CMS EDU - Chicago and Beyond

This is a really interesting and informative article, written by a developer who has some experience with open source CMS in the context of government, as well as some very strong opinions. In general they favor custom development over the use of open source CMS, and appear to believe that open source CMS offers diminishing returns in situations where a significant amount of customization is needed anyway.

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