This is the beginning of a series of posts, trying to break down what we’re really looking for from a particular tool.  I’d like to throw out the “ooh shiny!” aspect of product comparisons, throw out the subjective, and really ask ourselves if this new product is solving the problem we need it to.

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 A Laptop Hinge by any other name could sound so sweet.

“Its the hinge that squeaks that gets the grease”
-Malcolm X

This will be a repository of my ongoing search for the perfect CMS.
You know, the one that does everything out of the box, and is actually easy to use.

You’d think by now someone could find a solution to this problem.

You’d think by now people could see through the bloatware and scope creep of “Enterprise” level solutions and actually just design something that was simple.  But no, the search goes on.
Here’s a list of things that I would LOVE to see implemented out-of-the-box in a “vanilla” install of the yet-undiscovered CMS silver-bullet.

CMS for Very small, one-man content creation:   WordPress
Designed for small businesses (<20 employees or <1 tech person), freelance,
personal sites, resumes, portfolios and of course blogs.  The huge community of developers and free, open-source plugins can’t be beat for a small blog or site.  Pretty much any small widget you can think of wanting to display on a webpage is at your fingertips in a moment with the pre-made widgets and plugins libraries hosted on wordpress.org.  When people think of having a “hands-off” kind of site where they can come in one every fortnight and *maybe* update some tiny piece of content, then this is the right tool to use.

CMS for Very Large, enterprise-wide solutions with permanent Developers working full-time   Sitecore CMS
  Microsoft Sharepoint

Whats missing?  A CMS designed for a small-medium sized business or organization with lots of “big company

1. Site Architecture
   1. Multiple domains and/or subdomains – how is this currently handled?
      1. It was a pain to move my WordPress site from one domain to another
         I finally go it working, only to discover all my <img> paths were hardcoded to the old site
      2. Even sitecore and sharepoint don’t do this well.
      3. Basically it shouldn’t be a big deal to design this into a CMS.
   2. preset SEO for common use cases (WordPress also does a good job with these.)
      1. Google Analytics is what most people use.  Lets make it easily available AND customize-able (not rocket science here people).
      2. Alexa page rank in-dashboard for editors.
2. Blog functionality built-in (For easy use, quick start)
   1. RSS feed built-in (WordPress does this well  myblog.com/rss or myblog.com/tag/rss should always be it)
3. Page and Object Templates - Separation of Data and Style, very similar to the idea of the separation of View and Model in programming – as in MVC or MVVM
   1. This is why we got away from classic ASP in the first place.  Seperation of church and state.
   2. Enables use of “Themes” – ie. preset look/feel for a site without changing the underlying architecture and/or data.
4. Input Polymorphic/Inheritable DocTypes or Page Input Templates – For site dev’s to control what content creators can create
   1. Yes, this is something a Medium size company needs, needs to architect/build well, yet no-one seems to offer a good preset mode.
   2. Bottom layer should be Page versus Object – All Pages should have fields for motivating users to fill SEO information, Redirect information, User editable Page Category/Tags, as well as Date Published, etc.
      1. “Objects” would be in-page pieces or widgets -which don’t need to have SEO info but could still benefit from Tags or Categories, perhaps a different set than those used with pages.