With new technologies like wave, pubsubhubbub, and rss cloud being developed and adopted the real-time web is becoming more and more a reality. If you thought Twitter was overwhelming now, imagine when there is zero delay between your status updates and your follower’s peepers. Or when you receive a push notification on your mobile the second a transaction is posted to your account. It won’t be long before the real-time experience will be expected by users and this puts a lot of pressure on content providers who would historically hide behind the technical limitations of the medium as an excuse for providing stale content.
The demand for fresh content will force everything else on the web into the background. So why is your website’s content only being updated once every three months, if that? Why is it still being maintained by the resident of your agency’s cold damp basement? Someone with the communication skills of a caveman and just so happens to refer to himself as “Web Master” or “Master of the Webiverse” in some desperate attempt to live out his He-Man fantasies, “I have the power!” This just won’t do. The time has long passed for individual businesses to take control over their own online presence, this includes your website’s content! You’d think we would be well past this by now but I’m continually surprised by how many companies I advise that don’t.
The solution, get your hands on a decent open-source CMS to manage your content such as SilverStripe, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc, or insist that the web company or agency you work with provides you with one.
Why open-source and not a proprietary or home-brewed solution?
- There are no licensing fees.
- You are not subjected to vendor lock-in. In the event you have a falling out with your web company you have the right to both your data and the underlying system since it is an open platform.
- There is a huge community of developers from all over the globe continually adding new functionality to the system, and you get the result of their labor for free.
- Any additional functionality you’d typically need is available via a plugin or module and doesn’t have to be custom developed. If you want your site to integrate with your twitter feed, no problem!
- Since the source code is available for you to view and modify you can hire any developers with the appropriate skills to add in custom functionality without worrying about licensing issues or code obfuscation.
- Did I mention there are no licensing fees?
I recently have started to adopted SilverStripe as our primary platform for managing content. It is highly extensible and provides nearly all the functionality our clients typically need. If you find yourself in the above situation and want a system like this setup to manage your website’s content, we got you covered!
