Research Presentation
We will be conducting a presentation on Content Management Systems (CMS). Our focus is on seeing where they are and looking ahead to where they are going. Will they be used more or less in the future? What are some of the hurdles the designers of CMS systems still face?
Here are some of the questions we have been asked to consider and our responses to them:
Who are the thought leaders behind your topic?
Dave Cameron, Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder, Matt Mullenweg
Dave Cameron is a "Web Strategy & UX Enabler" who has been sourced for his thoughts on the future of CMS, mainly decoupling the frontend and backend. Some prevalent authors include Deane Barker, Author of "Web Content Management Systems, features, and best practices" and Melissa Rach and Kristina Halvorson, who co-wrote Content Strategy for the Web, which reached #55 on Amazon's books on Web Design.
Links:
-
Where did this topic originate? Who created or founded?
In 1992, AOL developed RAINMAN, a basic Content Management System, containing only collections in the form of folders, and text files in the form of articles. However this was not as open to consumers as it still required employee involvement. Later more mainstream services became available such as LiveJournal (created by computer science major Brad Fitzpatrick) and Blogger (made by Pyra Labs), a service that allowed anyone to edit personal webpages known as "Weblogs," later shortened to "Blogs."
Links:
-
Where can information be found about your topic and what kind of information is it (exercises, forums, code repos, etc)?
Information can be found to some extend in library accessible research databases, but the vast majority is available via various sites online. There are the sites for the individual content management systems themselves along with sites which rank and compare them. For some open source content management systems, there are additionally open source repos like Github which host the code and thus provide deeper access to understanding the systems themselves.
Links:
-
What does the future hold for this topic? What are new developments
Artifical intelligence will streamline CMS system use, essentially replacing much of the need for user administration and formatting. In some cases, it will probably replace the entering of content as well.
CMSs will start to "decouple" frontend and backend allowing for more customization and optimization for different platforms, such as for mobile, Xbox one, etc. This has already started happening.
Links:
-
Review blog posts, API documentation, code sources, etc
Several popular CMS systems like Wordpress, Drupal, and MediaWiki are open source platforms. This means their source code is freely available. For each of these big three listed above, their respective sites features extensive documentation sections. Additionally, a simple search with Google reveals an abundance of blog posts with tutorials.
Links:
-
Insights from your research
Before doing this research, I would have used a more narrow definition for a content management system. I would have limited it to purely web content and to systems like Wordpress, Drupal, or MediaWiki (Wikipedia) which allow for users to create web content like sites and pages easily. After researching this, I have realized Content Management Systems are broader in definition, including the aforementioned, but also including use scenarios like LMS (Learning Management Systems) for education, internal business collaboration, or even document collaboration. They can even exist in non web instances. Maybe it’s best considered that CMS systems are really good for allowing users to easily create web sites and web pages, but extend far beyond those generative use cases.
Links: