It’s impossible to say this comprehensively, but most people in publishing hate the CMS, or content management system, they’re forced to use at work. Increasingly, media companies are opting away from open source platforms like Drupal and WordPress and building custom content management systems to power their websites.
Exactly how integral is the content management system to good storytelling on the web? And what’s so hard about building a decent one?
The Publisher’s Competitive Advantage
Reuters columnist Felix Salmon predicted that media companies would either thrive or perish on the efficacy of their publishing platforms. Indeed, several companies, from BuzzFeed to Vox Media, publisher of the Verge, have made notable investments in their CMS, even as innovators in the space declare the CMS needs to be “burned to the ground.”
Why so much pressure on the lowly CMS? For one, the complexity of editorial packages continues to increase, thanks in part to the success of projects such as the New York Times‘s “Snow Fall” and the Guardian‘s “NSA Files: Decoded.” These interactive pieces get lots of attention, and publishers are seeking to better exploit the rich storytelling features offered by the web.
But how much does a site’s underlying technology actually influence its day-to-day operations?
It’s Not About Tech–It’s About Workflow
Despite the hullabaloo over the clever design of projects such as “Snow Fall,” the CMS arguably has a greater impact on editorial workflow than design. Take FastCompany itself–its CMS was rebuilt after the magazine launched two new sites, Co.Design and Co.Create. Previously, each site had its own CMS, slightly modified from that of the main site. When changes needed to be made across verticals, each site had to be updated separately. After joining FastCompany in 2011, CTO Matt Mankins decided to rebuild the CMS from the ground up on Node.js.
“It was my stance that the only rational way forward was to consolidate the CMSes and create a presentation layer,” he says. In other words: All the different Fast Company client sites or apps would load their content from one common stack.