Let me start by saying I’m a happy user of different content management systems (CMSs). I appreciate some of the work involved in their development (e.g. I’ve had the chance to build a small one, which was ugly, painful and slow), and I’ve had the chance to use some open source and proprietary CMSs. In fact, I expect we will use Radiant soon for some of our content, and I appreciate its simplicity and focus.
However, I’ve always wanted to extend a CMS to work with content versions like I think about it – i.e. like a software developer.
For better or worse, I look at content management from the same POV as I do managing code. Let me explain further: any software project I’ve been involved with saves its source code in a source repository with revision control. Additionally, we typically use the repository to create a snapshot of the code and set it aside for some particular purpose (e.g. test a new version, debug and fix a production version, etc.) [note by snapshot, I’m speaking generically; e.g. for subversion, it’d be ‘svn copy’, for cvs, it’d be ‘cvs tag’]. This ability allows us to have several streams of work going in parallel, e.g. developing new stuff, bug fixes on the pending release and bug fixes on an already released version in production.
However, the CMSs I’ve used all have their own notion of revision control (if any at all) and none of them follow a similar workflow as we do in development. For example, if I am developing a new revision to a product, then I want to be able to author the content for that revision separate from other versions. Yet, the CMSs I’ve used force me to keep all of my content integrated into their system and co-mingled with administrative data. Some of them offer a notion of versioning – but I’ve not found one that is consistent with how I’ve done versioning in development.
At best, I have something like Radiant’s ability to export & import the whole database, and then sync that up with the versions of the software I’m working on in development.
What would I like? I’d like the ability for content to be separated out in a CMS which will allow me to integrate with the source repositories I use, so that I can manage the content as part of the same workflow I use with managing versions of software. When will I fix this? It’s on my list of side projects…
Continued Discussion
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