How do you choose and evaluate your new CMS?

How do you know what CMS is best for your website? Oshyn's VP of Services, Christian Burne, says you need to simplify the process and look at your key business needs. He also explains why most packages will cover all requirements you have, so you have to find one that meets your key needs the best.

Video Transcript:

Audience Member: “What steps do you go through to evaluate, you know, you look at Drupal. You say, ‘I want to implement this but how does it handle?’ How do I incorporate that idea having the user or user-generated content?”

Jose Caballer, The Skool: “Let’s set a very specific example. You want to use Drupal to build a social network and people are going to upload their pictures so how do you deal with assessing a CMS based on the fact that you want to use it for more than just corporate publishing.”

Audience Member: “Well, let’s just put it this way, I want to build a site like Facebook.”

Jose Caballer, The Skool: “Right, so which CMS is better? So, Christian, what would you do in assessing that situation?”

Christian Burne, Oshyn: “First of all I’ll tell you, don’t build a site like Facebook but the user-generated content is one of the, you know, many factors you’ll need consider when choosing which CMS you are going to use cause there’s some that are going to be better than others and there’s also third-party tools that you can possibly plug in if you already have an incumbent CMS that you need to use. So, I mean, there is really no good answer but yes there are going to be technology architectural reasons why one is going to be better than the other. And mostly that’s related to… is it a publishing platform or is it a runtime platform. Is the CMS on the actual content delivery system itself and that is important because when a user uploads the content it needs to go into the system and if you have the delivery platform separated from the management platform with a hard wall in-between it’s hard to get the content from website back into the management platform . So there’s some architectural things that you will need to understand about the content management system to determine if it’s going to be a good fit or not but after that you are looking at what kind of features does it have. Most of the time they aren’t going to be any. UGC functionality kind of turnkey, you are either going to use a plug in or you are going to need to plug in a third party tool to be able to help you do that. But, you know, like I said, it’s one of many factor. I often tell people when they are deciding to choose one CMS or another…we use to do these spreadsheets. I have spreadsheets on my archive that are 500 line items long of all the features that you could ever want on a CMS and you rank them and you weight them and come up with an answer. And now I do it much simpler than that. I try to understand what are your key business requirements and then, you know, there’s going to be a sphere of packages that will do a good job at those key requirements and your best bet is to target those key requirements and target those packages and decide from that smaller universe of packages that address those key business requirements. Like if UGC is really important for you, then you should look at these five. If e-commerce, if you need e-commerce or digital marketing or if you need some other key business requirement focus in on those key business requirements and choose those packages.”

Jose Caballer, The Skool: “What is the key component of the business and choose a platform that relates to that. That’s great advice, instead of just broadly selecting it. So if you are going to do UGC what platform does UGC better based on your research? Go with that even if it might not have some of the features that you want long-term.”

Christian Burne, Oshyn: “Probably UGC isn’t the question, it’s more community. That’s probably what the question is and there’s going to be some platforms that are going to do community better and UGC will be a component of that community.”