content management system

If you missed the big news this weekend, WhiteHouse.gov has officially made the switch to using open source platform, Drupal as its content management system over the proprietary CMS platform that was in use before.

According to a great blog post by Nancy Scola at TechPresident:

Popular Content Management System is geared to run its first ever Camp in Dallas.

A Content Management System or CMS, is a piece of software, such as Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla, which allows an end user to build a powerful, dynamic website with little to no custom programming. Websites built with a content management system are typically easy to update and make changes to.

For those of you familiar with a traditional project management process, you’re probably familiar with a typical project life cycle- plan, budget, design, develop, test and release, AKA waterfall. This style of management can typically be found in fixed-bid projects. You may be less familiar with the percentage of projects that utilize this management process, yet fail to stay within the project’s intended time line, budget and scope.

According to the “Chaos Report”, a project management study on software development companies:

…35 percent of software projects started in 2006 can be categorized as successful, meaning they were completed on time, on budget and met user requirements. This is a marked improvement from the first, groundbreaking report in 1994 that labeled only 16.2 percent of projects as successful…

35 percent! Almost two out of every three software development or integration projects are failures. If you are not planning on selling services or merchandise on your site, collecting customer data or statistics, or updating site content via a content management system, you can probably rest assured your project will not be a total failure. However, if you are planning on utilizing any or all of these features into your website, I highly recommend you continue reading.

For those of you familiar with a traditional project management process, you’re probably familiar with a typical project lifecycle- plan, budget, design, develop, test and release. You may be less familiar with the percentage of projects that utilize this management process, yet fail to stay within the project’s intended timeline, budget and scope.

According to the “Chaos Report”, a project management study on software development companies:

The LevelTen site engine is the collection of software packages that LevelTen uses to help you manage the content of your website while maintaining a professional and appealing website. LevelTen hit counter LevelTen content management system l10cms integrated user management levelten ecommerce

The LevelTen content management system (l10cms) is designed to provide an easy interface for creating and managing many kinds of content. While maintaining it allows administrators to control the overall function of a system while allowing any user to easily create content and publish it on the website. It is part of the LevelTen site engine user management. Many levels of users are available so content can be written by one user and approved by HR, legal, or other departments within a company.

If you're in web development then you've heard the term WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and probably cringe at even the slightest mention of it. Among what would be considered a WYSIWYG includes Dreamweaver, Front Page, and a host of others that web developers would rather not think about. However, with the advent of the CMS (Content Management System), clients needed a way to create their own content without having to know or learn HTML and/or CSS.